From: lars@spectrum.CMC.COM (Lars Poulsen)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.sys.unisys
Subject: Re: HISTORY OF WORD PROCESSING
Date: 24 Jan 93 07:52:44 GMT
Organization: CMC Network Systems (Rockwell DCD), Santa Barbara, CA, USA

In article <1993Jan15.173341.3969@wam.umd.edu>
   davei@wam.umd.edu (The One True Dave) writes:
>  I may be wrong (correct me if I am) but I do believe that word processing
>as we know it started with Wang Labs in the late 60's/early 70's. Dr.
>Wang apparently got tired of making programmable calculators and slipped
>into the world of office minicomputers. His word processing program was
>simply called "Wang Word Processing." In fact, I'm pretty certain that
>was where the term came from. (The package was unique in that it was 99%
>identical across the Wang line, and remains so to this day. If you used
>Wang WP on a 2200, you can use it on one of the big virtual systems
>(VS100?) or a PC. The look and feel, the menus and keystrokes, are all
>the same.)

My first experience with machine-readable documentation was the Univac
Exec-8 Operating System Programmer's Reference Manual (fondly known as
the PRM; I used to know the UP-xxxx number by heart). I got in touch
with this in late 1970, but it was not new then. (It was very poorly
done, in UPPER-CASE ONLY, SINCE THE NATIVE CHARACTERSET WAS 6-BIT
FIELDATA AND THE OFFICIAL COPY WAS OFFSET PRINTED OFF COPY PRINTED ON A
MISADJUSTED DRUM PRINTER.)

At that time, IBM had been producing manuals in SCRIBE for several
years, and the IBM 2741 Selectric Terminal was the industry standard
for what I believe IBM at that time called Text Processing.

I was working at the Copenhagen University Academic Computer Center
(RECKU, now part of UNI-C) and at the request of the biology department,
we installed terminal device drivers for the IBM 2741 and clones. In
1972, we upgraded the operating system, and the old driver did not work
anymore, so we wrote a new one. About 5000 lines of assembly language,
and worked very shortly after we got the new system to test on. At the
same time, the "Document Processor" formatting software, and the editor
became available in ASCII versions so we could write lower-case
documents.

In 1975 I moved to a small real-time integration house, and I missed the
document processor so bad that I re-implemented most of it in PDP-11
Fortran to do our project documentation on. The other programmer, as
well as the manager and our customers all thought that was pretty
strange.

In 1977 we took over the local distribution for Wang Labs, just as Wang
went from "programmable calculators" to "Word Processing", and it was a
flying start.

The WPS system had fairly little in common with any Wang system that
went before it. It was 8080-based, and used an appletalk-like LAN
interface between the terminal unit and the smart disk drive (file
server). Each workstation had its own port on the file server, and the
cabling was twin coax; one cable was BNC the other TNC to avoid getting
them crossed.

The 2200 system had terminals that were similar to the WPS workstations,
but were attached with regular RS-232, although they used 11-bit async
format in order to be incompatible with everybody else (8E1 format, I
think). When the VS family came out, it used the WPS workstation with a
relabeled keyboard as a data entry terminal.

Both the WPS and VS systems loaded the operating code into the
workstation at system boot time. Around 1979, the WPS option became
available for VS. When you started the WPS program, the system would
reload the workstation with the WPS program instead of the data entry
code, and run a program to emulate the WPS file server on the VS. Thus,
it was fairly trivial to achieve keystroke compatibility between the
systems.

The idea of reloading the workstation caught on, and was soon added to
the WPS system, which was then renamed the OIS (Office Information
System). To support the enhancement, the OIS had a larger processor (6
MHz Z80 ??) with several switchable memory banks. I think there were 3
different workstation loads: Word Processing, OIS Basic, and File System
Utilities. OIS Basic was dismal; there was no file or record locking,
and the documentation warned sharply against implementing anything
critical (such as business applications) on the system.

WPS for 2200 was a separate implementation; I think it was done by a 3rd
party and implemented completely in 2200 basic.

---
Fun stuff. Sometimes I miss it...
-- 
/ Lars Poulsen, SMTS Software Engineer	Internet E-mail: lars@CMC.COM
  CMC Network Products / Rockwell Int'l	Telephone: +1-805-968-4262	
  Santa Barbara, CA 93117-3083		TeleFAX:   +1-805-968-8256