I met Jerry once, at a BYTE-sponsored conference held at McCormick Place
in Chicago. Colorful. I already knew his writing, of course. He will be
missed.
Now:
From: Guy Sotomayor Jr
Sent: Sunday, September 10, 2017 4:59 PM
> I think it all depends upon how you define “word processing”. For me I
> absolutely detest things like MS Word. Probably because I started with
> markup languages.
> The first one was one that I wrote for the IBM 1130 so I could do a high
> school research paper (1974). It was written in Fortran (sorry long gone)
> and the “paper” was all on punch cards and printed on a 1403 printer. I did
> it mainly because it was a pain to keep track of how to format for footnotes
> and attributions.
I didn't think of it as word processing, but I did something similar at Ohio
State in 1974. I worked on the consulting team (= "help desk") for the College
of Administrative Science, hired because I (a) knew COBOL from my high school
adventures and (b) knew Coursewriter III from my time at the University of
Texas Computer-Assisted Instruction laboratory. I was supposed to write an
on-line Quick (Introduction to) COBOL.
At UT, I had seen text input for the Coursewriter II system (IBM 1500) done on
punched cards, and probably for the 360/50 running Coursewriter III but I
didn't have access to that computer room. I thought that that was a really
good way to do it, and convinced my boss to let me create a program for the
same purpose using PL/I (my favorite language at the time). A grad student
wrote the COBOL course, and 2 other undergraduates put his text onto coding
sheets in Coursewriter III markup for our 2 professional keypunch operators to
enter.
At first I had the ladies (and they were) entering multipunch TAB and similar
characters, but then I got an idea from the single Hazeltine 1500 in our
terminal room: A CONTROL key! I used 2 shift characters, a cent sign for
CONTROL and a dollar sign for SHIFT, with the pair in opposite orders for
characters themselves in course text.
Overall, it saved about 6 months over the previous regime of having
undergraduates typing course material in on 2741 terminals. I was rewarded
with a big raise, from $3.35/hr to $3.50/hr. Not bad for a college kid in 1974.
As it happens, I had tried using Coursewriter III for word processing (though I
did not know that's what I was doing) in the fall of 1973, entering the text of
"The Goblin Market" from the pages of (IIRC) the September 1973 issue of
_Playboy_. I was not satisfied with the result because the fixed spacing on
the 2741 did not work well to mimic the fancy printing job in the magazine.
> At CMU I used Scribe that output to the XGP (Xerox Graphics Printer driven by
> a PDP-11/45). This was the first time I used something where there were
> selectable fonts (1976). At IBM *everything* was done with various versions
> of SCRIPT. At this point I can’t recall but I believe a number of the IBM
> manuals were all done in SCRIPT.
I didn't encounter SCRIPT until I was in graduate school at UChicago, working
at the Computation Center. My first programming job there (after I was
promoted from the help desk) was to update the program from using Wylbur-format
text internally to using SuperWYLBUR when the Comp Center went to the more
capable commercial product. I used SCRIPT to create my Advanced Dungeons &
Dragons materials for a campaign I was running.
I believe that all the IBM manuals which use the 1403 TN train were done using
SCRIPT to produce camera-ready copy, but that's from hearsay.
> I then used Interleaf (a *high* end document publishing/management system)
> and then FrameMaker (before Adobe completely screwed it up and finally killed
> it).
Used FrameMaker at Cisco. Loved the output. Hated the proprietary file format,
which meant that nothing I did could be reused on another computer.
> I currently use LaTex for producing anything more complicated than an email.
Although I encountered TeX at UChicago (one of my office mates came from
Stanford and knew DEK), I didn't learn and use it until I got to XKL, where the
Toad-1 manual was done using LaTeX with local mods (thus TeX was necessary). I
did the work on updating the Tops-20 JSYS manuals there, although they were
never released while I was working for Len.
(Oh. I just remembered. I *did* used infotex once at Stanford, for some
manual I wanted in hardcopy, but I can't remember what for. Different from
LaTex just to be different, I think.)
I still prefer markup languages to word processing systems, but I'm kind of
stuck with Word at work, for obvious reasons. While I was still a contractor,
back in 2003, I wrote all my reports in LaTeX and created documents with
pdflatex, which I consider a gift from the gods.
Rich