Every now and then, sense2cents takes you down memory lane for a bit. This is one of those posts. So, flashback to 1990.

In a brightly lit, air conditioned office a teenage boy is bent over a computer screen watching as a smartly-dressed man types at a computer terminal. The boy watches in amazement as the screen keeps filling and scrolling up. He listens intently as the clackety-clack of the keyboard makes words appear on the screen as if by magic.

Once all the typing is done, the man calls to the boy to pay close attention – he is about to demonstrate what the boy has come to really see – he selects a paragraph of text and uses the “Cut” function to make it vanish. He then scrolls up a couple of paragraphs, selects the “Paste” function and presto – the vanished paragraph magically reappears in the new place. What’s more, the existing text actually moves over to make space for the newly inserted paragraph!

The teenager cannot help but marvel at this miracle of technology. He asks the man to explain to him (yet again) how a paragraph of text can be removed from the place it was once written in and made to appear somewhere else in the document. The man patiently explains that the machine is a computer, not a typewriter and that it is all digitized and hence, intangible.

The man then proceeds to print a copy of the document on a dot-matrix printer and the boy marvels as he sees the neat words appear on the page as the printer continues to buzz and spit out paper. The boy understands precious little of what he has seen and heard in that little incident, but deep within, he knows he had been shown something that he will never, ever, forget. He also realizes that he has found something that he can devote his entire life to studying and make a career of – the science of Computers.

Cut – Back to 2008.

The boy in the above scene was me and the man was my Uncle who worked in the Accounting Department of a large corporation in India. One day I had the good fortune to spend some time with him in the office.

Till then, I had only read about these marvelous things called ‘Computers’ but had never seen one. My uncle showed me how one could edit a document on a program called Word-Star and move paragraphs around and a spreadsheet software called ‘Peacock’ (which apparently was a modified version of Lotus 1-2-3). He also handed me a printout which at that time was an amazing experience.

Sometimes, as I type, I am amazed at the speed at which Word Processing has developed. I started out with the humble Word-Star (as far as I can remember), then migrated to Word-Star for Windows and then to MS-Word. Now, we have almost taken the next step with the Internet – now you can actually type, see and edit almost everything online. You can make a document online and bring it to your computer offline or vice-versa. Proprietary word processors are gradually losing ground to open standards – we are now talking about a standard where you will soon be able to use your own tool – but conform to the data standard automatically. Three Cheers for progress!

Here is a link that describes the evolution of the humble Word Processor. I reproduce the main points here:

1. Word processing evolved from the needs of writers rather than those of mathematicians, only later merging with the computer field. The invention of printing and moveable type at the end of the Middle Ages was the initial step in this automation. But the first major advance from manual writing as far as the individual was concerned was the typewriter.
2. Christopher Latham Sholes, with the assistance of two colleagues, invented the first successful manual typewriter in 1867. It began to be marketed commercially in 1874, rather improbably by a gun manufacturing company, E. Remington and Sons. Typewriters were made popular by the development of portable models, first marketed in the early 1900s.
3. In the 1930s IBM introduced a more refined version, the IBM Electromatic and was soon followed by the M. Shultz Company’s introduction of the automatic typewriter, which made it possible to produce multiple typed copies of form letters identical in appearance to the hand-typed original. This bulky machine was succeeded by a device called the Flexowriter, which used paper tape.
4. In 1961 IBM introduced the Selectric typewriter, and in 1964 the MT/ST (Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter), which combined the features of the Selectric with a magnetic tape drive. This development marked the beginning of word processing as it is known today.
5. The term “Word Processing” was a translation of the German word textverabeitung, coined in the late 1950s by Ulrich Steinhilper, an IBM engineer.
6. In the early 1970s IBM developed the floppy disk and it was soon adopted by the word processing industry.
7. Over the next ten years many new features were introduced such as spelling check and mailing list programs and the feature to allow users to keep working on more than one document at a and time on the same screen.
8. WordStar, put out by Micropro International, emerged as the industry standard in software packages, though others surpassed it in one feature or another. It was then succeeded by Word through the MS-Office suite.