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Wordprocessing
In the late 60s when I started in the corporate world, the term word processing didn’t even exist. If you talked about typing, people would send you to the typing pool where six or eight typists worked on all the documents that we accountants and finance people generated for analytic reports or the monthly financials. Not much technology there yet.
One fancy bit of tech our company did have around then, though, was a centralized calculator system made by Wang Laboratories. The engineers got little nixie-tube calculators on their desks which were all connected by cable to the central processing unit. Wildly powerful by the day’s standards, these replaced slide rules and tedious hand calculations in their design work. Wang, incidentally, was founded by An Wang a physicist who was literally “present at the creation” of computers — he held the patent for core memory which he sold to IBM for the funds to start Wang Laboratories.
A few years later, Wang moved heavily into the new field of word processing. They married a CRT screen with a keyboard, central processor and IBM Selectric typewriter. Typists could now make corrections on the screen, making letter-perfect hard copies in an instant.
Out of this world
Having already programmed for years in COBOL, then Fortran and Basic, I got my first personal computer in 1981, an Apple II+. It had 48k of RAM, a Motorola 6502 microprocessor and a floppy drive which maybe could handle 140k per floppy. It had a converter to use with an old tv and a clickity-clackity keyboard. I was so impressed with my new computer power.
Not long after getting it, I added a CP/M card. Now I had a second computer in the same case, this one with 64k, a Zilog Z80 cpu and it offered a more sophisticated, vaguely UNIXy environment. Now things were getting really advanced.
Then came VisiCalc, WordStar and dBase and the world — and PCs, haven’t been the same since.
More on this technological journey in the posts to come.