Fifteen Word Processor Commandments (1984) | Hacker News Reader

Fifteen Word Processor Commandments (1984)

wholeearth.info

30 pointse12e20 comments

I can't help but think that all of these are secondary to or at least specialized expressions of Raskin's laws:

- An interface shall not harm your content, or through inaction, allow your content to come to harm.

- An interface shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.

- An interface shall not allow itself to get into a state where it cannot manipulate content.

On the bottom of page 37 (just before the commandments piece) they list a bunch of different competitive word processor products, but they don't mention WordPerfect which shortly after that was the absolute dominant product for the IBM PC till the rise of Win30 after 1990.

It also doesn't mention Microsoft Word which had also been released months before with a lot of press attention. A few pages later (after the commandments piece) they discuss the Microsoft Mouse which was essentially released to accompany Microsoft Word. Even though Word for DOS never became popular, it did have the first rudimentary WYSIWYG for the PC but you needed a graphics card which most PCs did not have. Would have been a good mention for this issue though.

Bear in mind that prior to desktop publishing tools (which arrived circa 1986-88) laying out a magazine/large format book like WER was a time-consuming and labour intensive job; typesetting was a photographic process using a phototypesetter to etch the printing plates at best (digital phototypesetting was around but very bleeding-edge), and printing was also a mechanical process. Even with a streamlined workflow, allocating an entire month to the production process would make it a tight fit. Then add another month for distribution around the US (most likely via railfreight to intermediate wholesale warehouses before bundles were shipped out to bookstores). Finally note that the date on the cover of a periodical is when the store clerks take the item off sale and strip the covers to return them as evidence of destruction in return for credit (any sold -- no covers provided -- copies must then be paid for, to the wholesaler and ultimately the publisher).

If that sounds like a stone-age process ... well, it's the way publishing used to be done: it predates computerization and containerization by some decades, and it was only beginning to change in the 1980s.

To make matters worse, the writing/editing process would be mediated entirely by sending drafts back and forth via the mail, so you can reasonably add a couple of weeks to the process of writing and then approving a draft compared to what it would take today.

Upshot: this issue was probably finalized 3-4 months before the date on the cover. Microsoft Word was quite possibly not available to reviewers in time to make it into the magazine.

(Source: I used to write software reviews for Computer Shopper -- the British version of the title, not the same as the US one -- in the late 80s to early 90s. Smaller country, different tech by then, but it was still a tedious back-and-forth with printed drafts in envelopes with stamps on them (and sometimes floppy disks!).)

We had a "reprographics" shop in high school. Printing presses, etching plates, literal cut-n-paste of pieces of paper to do layout.

One day a few of us cut two classes in a row to finish a layout (so three class periods total including the repro class) and by lunchtime we were all acting really silly and laughing too much. We eventually figured out that we had been leaning over the layout table pasting so long that we had accidentally "huffed" the glue fumes!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprography

This was my experience working as reporter on a rural weekly in the late 1970s. We had a photo typesetter than produced column-width copy, screen-printed photos, used clip-art for ads, then laid it all out on paper the size of the printed page with and photographed the pages on a process camera to go for printing. k We shared our office with an old-school print shot with a genuine Linotype hot-metal typesetting machine, so in addition to the constant sound of my manual Olympia typewriter, my days were filled with the regular klunk of freshly-cast slugs dropping from the machine.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. It’s easy to forget what times were like before home computers.

wordstar was my absolute favourite, as both a word processor and a programming editor (before i switched to vi). the first copy i ever got, i had to patch in z80 machine code (with the supplied wordstar patch utility) to make the keyboard and display interfaces usable, which made me feel quite clever.

this would have been early 80s.

The old menu system approach was spectacular for education.

Menus were more like categories, types of operations, and within those sections of the menu grouped like operations.

Each menu had a shortcut for invocation, usually Alt + the first letter of the menu, but sometimes an underlined second letter, or maybe FN key directly.

Within the menu most entries had an underlined key - if the interaction focus was in that menu, that key would invoke the related option / operation.

If there was an action the end user wanted to do frequently, nearly always there was also a direct keyboard combination that could trigger it while in the edit plane.

Many users learned of Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Ctrl+V (copy, cut, paste, respectively, for early 'dos' / Windows) or even on Macintosh whatever the respective keys were, from the edit menu. They tended to work in most applications and in the standard OS widgets (think text boxes of just about any sort).

These days, that sort of in-situ power user education, to empower new users is much harder to come by. It really doesn't help with so many things are designed mobile phone / web (no OS at all) / console and ported to PC (OMG all the times that inventory or design system in a game irks you).

In the 90's, all these features shifted to buttons - Office / MS Word especially had heaps of them, a whole system to configure and move these buttons to your preferences, and I'm sure there were lots more if you had plugins.

Then the 2000's came around and Office 2000-something introduced the Ribbon, in an attempt to reduce the amount of UI elements and streamline the process. But the focus was on less UI clutter.

Nowadays there's WYSIWYG editors in web browsers for writing documents like that one from Dropbox or Notion, intentionally limiting how much markup you can do; they're text/word processors again, instead of full design suites.

Buttons/ ribbons should be in addition to the menu though.

And a keyboard shortcut is still faster.

The menu shortcut system is really good for those large enterprise systems, where multiple users use it in very different ways. If you're just inputting data, you can slowly learn the shortcuts for that. If you spend your time generating reports, you can learn the shortcuts for that. There doesn't need to be any assumptions about how the software will be used. There doesn't need to be loads of effort put into a flexible UI.

We spent the last 15 years avoiding the menu bar in mobile devices, and in the end we reinvented it in the worst way. Hidden under either the hamburger button on Android, the "…" or whatever other button on iOS.

Seeing how this was created in Sausalito, as was the Well, makes me quite nostalgic for a different era for tech in the Bay Area that was less money focused and a bit more California-focused. I wish that was a possibility again, but I think the money has polluted things too much. Now people move for the money versus come for the bay and it’s spirit.

I don't see it mentioned, but LEWP (Leading Edge Word Processing) was the bomb. I was so fast in that thing. Kind of like vim but more intuitive. WordPerfect was ridiculously capable and full-featured. Word for DOS 6.0 won the word processor wars, though; it was just the right amount of both user-friendly and powerful.

AtariWriter FTW

Does anyone have the mentioned superfile manual?

Word for Windows 2 or 6 (there were no versions in between) was the peak of Word's evolution.

It's sad to see the shitshow that it has become, along with Windows. Talk about lost with no ideas, but desperately flailing to do... something.

> 5. You [should be able to] delete a character, word, text to end-of-line, and a complete sentence with a single keystroke (or combination of keystrokes if your keyboard has no function keys) at any time.

Is there a standard way of doing this on modern PCs? Seems like it would be handy given how much text we produce.

In Emacs to delete a char: C-d, word: M-d

end-of-line: C-k, -sentence: M-k

C -> Ctrl key, M -> Alt key

This is probably the closest you will come.

Press Home, then Shift + End or vise versa.

https://superuser.com/questions/947296/is-there-a-keyboard-s...

I really, really don't want to see any text centered below a chapter title.

My OCD is offended.

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