New Republic: How Literature Became Word Perfect.
Don’t forget daisywheels and pin-feed paper! I temped WP for a while in NYC, making $16/18 an hour in 1983, after being injured on a blue-collar job. Weekends were doubletime ($32) and ‘lobster’ was triple ($48). The law firms, Wall Street and news organizations were hard up for trained operators. Check the NY Times want ads on microfilm from the time. ‘Twas great money. I lived high off the hog, even had cars provided to drive me home when working OT. In the process discovered out my affinity for computing ... completely changing my career goals. I not only could use ‘em, I found I could streamline human workflows to make the most out of ‘em. I intrinsically understood their logic; started swapping logic boards to fix broken systems ... learning the operating systems of every unattended computer in any office I frequented. That ultimately proved to be my ticket.
Hmmm. Just remembering the ones I temped on: Singer (!), Xerox, Wang, NEC, DEC, CPT, Tandy, Apple (II, III, Lisa, Mac), IBM PC, Amtext-Jacquard, Jacquard, more. I think what modern historians forget, is that word processing was alive and well long before the personal computer and Mac/Win software. Too many articles only view through a lens of WordStar, WordPerfect, MS Word. The dedicated systems were *much* faster, until the Laserwriters started to pick up speed and were able to be networked. Laserwriter quality became demanded at management level first, the volume-users still depended on daisywheel/pinfeed for at least a couple of years after [dot matrix printers - meh]. The wonderful thing about dedicated (not PC) systems is that they had specific buttons for every function, rather than more cumbersome key-combinations on a “Swiss-Army-Knife” PC. WordStar was legendary for arcane and extensive combos - the joke on Wall Street was that you could tell a WordStar user by the fact they wore sandals to work ... they needed their toes to manage some of the key combos. And no temp agency held you to the 25-WPM requirement if you claimed to be able to temp on WordStar. *Any* WPM was considered ‘good enough’ to send out to a job.
I still wish for a configurable, modular keyboard setup. One for Photoshop, one for FCPX, etc. etc.
Comments:
I’ve told the story before, so if you’ve heard it, my apologies. When I was working in high end 3D visualization (Form*z, Electric Image, Renderman, etc.) I was trialing some of the more extensive packages on SGI Crimson workstations. Alias (before Autodesk) and TDI (a French company) impressed me most. The difference was - TDI had pluggable modules to the keyboard. Particularly handy was a simple board with six knobs in it. It stood vertically. You could extrude, rotate, loft ... all functions were programmable, contextual. I created an extensive model in minutes with the TDI, whereas the menu-based system on Alias was slow and cumbersome, basic features being buried.
There are a great deal of pluggable widgets for video editing on the Mac, and I’m thinking about getting one. Most are very minimal. A single knob! What a paucity of imagination!
But I’ll take it.
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For a long time, we shipped with our program a plasticy cardboard overlay that fit most keyboards and showed what the function keys did. It let us go an extra couple of years before we even added such a thing as a menu bar, because our GUI design with that bit of help was superior to menus. I bet you can configure the function keys for Photoshop et al. to work as dedicated buttons for common operations, and just swap overlays when you change applications.
BTW, I agree that the LaserWriter leveled up the entire Mac/PC word processing and office application field. In my industry, 3D printing seems to be doing the same thing, finally.