In the late 70s and 80s I made my living typing, mostly at law firms, so I saw the whole evolution firsthand. When I started it was typewriters with carbon paper and Wite-Out. Then came IBM Correcting Selectric ball typewriters and Xerox machines, then IBM Mag Card or occasionally the MT/ST tape version, then came the DisplayWriter or at bigger places Wang minicomputers with terminals. Somewhere in the mid-80s I started seeing laser printers at big places.
In 1967, Jim Henson made a promotional film for the IBM MT/ST with music by Raymond Scott (at that time, the only person in the world with a polyphonic sequencer). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk In the mid-80s I was freelance and worked at many different law firms in San Francisco and New York. Some of them had less popular systems such as the Xerox 860, which had the first WYSIWYG display and touchpad I encountered, and the Exxon Qyx, which had a little LED display: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--uwuseejvU Finally in the late 80s the law firms virtually all switched to PCs, WordPerfect, and HP LaserJet printers. For a couple of years I worked as a WordPerfect consultant, helping firms migrate from dedicated word processors, converting files (migrating documents from 8" DisplayWriter disks to 5-1/4" disks in WordPerfect format was a black art), writing macros to automate basic tasks, and writing printer drivers for off-brand laser printers. One reason WordPerfect beat WordStar, Word, et al. in the legal market was that it was fairly simple to get it to generate numbered legal pleading paper in a laser printer. There was even a special graphics card that did an approximation of WYSIWYG. https://books.google.com/books?id=-9qzy8Z8SKEC&pg=PA154&lpg=PA154&dq=hercules+graphics+card+plus+%22wordperfect%22&source=bl&ots=VR-lZjcVXX&sig=ACfU3U3NIXsYsLCQ7MvEISIMjn8sgOvSUw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi5zKjer9ToAhWwJzQIHeKhBzMQ6AEwAHoECAsQKg#v=onepage&q=hercules%20graphics%20card%20plus%20%22wordperfect%22&f=false On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 9:32 AM L Larson <[email protected]> wrote: > > Wow, this brings up SO many memories... > > Does anyone remember Micom, where an 8" floppy could hold as much as 100 > pages of straight text? How about Displaywriter, one of the first to move > from a dedicated system to a PC? ... _______________________________________________ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to [email protected] Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to [email protected]
