#Word perfect emulator for mac how to#
#Word perfect emulator for mac portable#
#Word perfect emulator for mac Pc#
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#Word perfect emulator for mac mac#

The Redactron was a Selectric connected to a box about three feet high next to our desks we'd type on paper, the box would record what we typed on cassettes, we could correct while typing or go back and make changes (up to a point), then print out a finished, cleaned page. The department, and the idiot boss, needed a consulting firm to come in and do an efficiency report on them!

#Word perfect emulator for mac plus#

Which of course added at least one time-consuming step, plus took them longer to write, plus they hated handwriting everything.

#Word perfect emulator for mac how to#

We discovered that the accountant-consultants all knew how to type, but were forbidden to type up their initial reports because the division chief believed typing was for clerks and secretaries so they were obliged to hand-write everything. In some cases it was faster to retype the whole document rather than try to edit in the changes. (We were using Redactron dedicated word processors, which used cassette tapes to record the documents. We'd type up the notes (and, often, edit them for grammar and spelling), send them back, then get back marked-up edits, which we'd retype, then these drafts would go to the bosses, who'd mark them up some more - and we'd retype them again. So the two accountants who worked on a project would handwrite their reports on yellow pads and send them to me and another guy who were the typing pool for this unit.

This unit would generate lengthy reports for their clients-they told me that the clients didn't believe they were getting their money's worth unless the report was at least 200 pages long. The department advised hospitals on efficiencies one example was a hospital that stacked up all the payment checks it received and deposited them once a week the auditors figured out that the amounts were so large that it would be worth it to them to hire someone to take the checks to the bank each day. I worked as a Kelly Girl during the late 70s, at one point for the consulting arm of Ernst & Ernst in Los Angeles.

#Word perfect emulator for mac mac#

Mac McCarthy, Publisher of aNewDomain and co-creator of the Dummies books. Some of us, like Mac McCarthy, actually used dedicated word processors before they used word processing software. Most of us were there in the early days of word processing and are still fond of our first word processors. I asked some of my fellow technology writers in the Internet Press Guild, a non-profit organization promoting excellence in technology journalism. But, at the time we were just happy to have any kind of word processing. Steve Jobs would, of course, look in on the Alto and see the mouse-based, bit-mapped graphics future that lead to the Macintosh.

#Word perfect emulator for mac Pc#

Indeed, I still use vi for editing Linux configuration files and some light word processing.ДЄs for graphical user interfaces? What are you talking about? Oh sure, there were mini-computers like the Xerox Alto, but in the early days of the PC world we used character-based interfaces and we liked it. To this day, both WordStar and vi's control sequences are locked into my fingers. This text-processing program still lives on in every Linux and Unix system ever made. Fonts were pretty much beyond us in these days of daisy-wheel and dot-matrix printers.ДЄt the same time, I was also learning vi. So long as you didn't want, oh say, fonts.

It was also the first popular What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) word processor. While there were earlier word processors, Electric Pencil, WordStar was for many of us the first word processor we could use on a general purpose PC. WordStar, which was God's gift to touch-typists, made it possible to use the control key-at the time the only 'alternative' key most PC keyboards had-to copy, cut, and paste text. Of course, you had to have a power outlet where-ever you went, we were a long, long way from having batteries that could power something like the new iPad for ten hours.

#Word perfect emulator for mac portable#

This was a portable computer only in the sense that if you absolutely had to move it, you could 'lug' its 24-pounds from one place to another. I first used it on an Osborne 1 'luggable' computer.

The first, and the one that counts as a real word processor, was WordStar. I've always been a glutton for punishment. I went from using my 'prized' IBM Selectric II to using two word processors at almost the same time. In my case, I made the change-over in 1980. The horror! The horror! But, then along came word processors and the world changed. Some of us, dare I admit it, wrote by hand on paper. Once upon a time, and it wasn't that long ago, instead of word processors like today's favorites such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs or OpenOffice and its brother LibreOffice, we had to use typewriters.