4 ms·

Thanks for mentioning Xerox PARC's Bravo editor. This 1974 editor was the first WYSIWYG editor and supported multiple, proportionally-spaced fonts. If you look

by kens 10y ago

Thanks for mentioning Xerox PARC's Bravo editor. This 1974 editor was the first WYSIWYG editor and supported multiple, proportionally-spaced fonts. If you look at the screenshots, Wordstar (1979) was character-based so I don't see how it could be called WYSIWYG. The article says: "All modern word processors owe their existence to Wordstar". That's just nonsense, since the Bravo editor was written by Charles Simonyi, who then wrote Word. It would be more accurate to say that all modern word processors owe their existence to Bravo.

kragen 10y ago
If you were printing on a fixed-pitch character-based printer (like most dot-matrix and daisy-wheel or golf-ball "letter-quality" printers of the time) then what you saw on the screen in WordStar was very much like what you would get on the printer, although WS did support bold and underline, which typical terminals didn't. Also the terminals were usually white (or green, or amber) on black, while the printers were invariably black on white. Do you know how far back screen editing (WordStar-style "WYSIWYG") in TECO goes? I'm pretty sure DEC TECO didn't have screen editing even in the late 1970s, and CP/M ED certainly didn't, which I am guessing means MIT TECO didn't have it at the point that DEC forked it. But it wouldn't be very surprising to me if MIT TECO had screen editing before 1974. http://multicians.org/mepap.html http://multicians.org/mepap.html seems to suggest that MIT TECO had screen editing by 1971: > An implementation of TECO (a version of which is the standard DEC editor) was built on Multics in 1971. This version was derived from the original TECO implementation, on the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10 [TECDOC]. Unlike the latter, Multics TECO has no display support, and does not have the complex control-structure constructs of the AI Lab editor. You will note, though, that even with screen editing support, TECO remained shamelessly command-oriented and modeful until the adoption of "Control R mode" in the late 1970s, presumably inspired by Bravo's less-modal interface. (I hesitate to say "modeless," though it was close.) I think "the Bravo editor was written by Charles Simonyi" is at best oversimplified. One version of the Bravo manual says, "Bravo was designed by Butler Lampson and Charles Simonyi, and implemented mainly by Tom Malloy, with substantial contributions from Carol Hankins, Greg Kusnick, Kate Rosenbloom, and Bob Shur." I don't think Simonyi wrote much of Word either, except in the sense that Reagan "wrote" Peggy Noonan's speeches; in Programmers at Work he talked about his process and about Tom Malloy: https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/programmers-at-work-charles-simonyi/ https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/programmers-at-work-...

by kens 10y ago

kragen 10y ago

If you were printing on a fixed-pitch character-based printer (like most dot-matrix and daisy-wheel or golf-ball "letter-quality" printers of the time) then what you saw on the screen in WordStar was very much like what you would get on the printer, although WS did support bold and underline, which typical terminals didn't. Also the terminals were usually white (or green, or amber) on black, while the printers were invariably black on white. Do you know how far back screen editing (WordStar-style "WYSIWYG") in TECO goes? I'm pretty sure DEC TECO didn't have screen editing even in the late 1970s, and CP/M ED certainly didn't, which I am guessing means MIT TECO didn't have it at the point that DEC forked it. But it wouldn't be very surprising to me if MIT TECO had screen editing before 1974. http://multicians.org/mepap.html http://multicians.org/mepap.html seems to suggest that MIT TECO had screen editing by 1971: > An implementation of TECO (a version of which is the standard DEC editor) was built on Multics in 1971. This version was derived from the original TECO implementation, on the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10 [TECDOC]. Unlike the latter, Multics TECO has no display support, and does not have the complex control-structure constructs of the AI Lab editor. You will note, though, that even with screen editing support, TECO remained shamelessly command-oriented and modeful until the adoption of "Control R mode" in the late 1970s, presumably inspired by Bravo's less-modal interface. (I hesitate to say "modeless," though it was close.) I think "the Bravo editor was written by Charles Simonyi" is at best oversimplified. One version of the Bravo manual says, "Bravo was designed by Butler Lampson and Charles Simonyi, and implemented mainly by Tom Malloy, with substantial contributions from Carol Hankins, Greg Kusnick, Kate Rosenbloom, and Bob Shur." I don't think Simonyi wrote much of Word either, except in the sense that Reagan "wrote" Peggy Noonan's speeches; in Programmers at Work he talked about his process and about Tom Malloy: https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/programmers-at-work-charles-simonyi/ https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/programmers-at-work-...