9 ms·

Will word processors start a home working revolution? (1979) [video]

166 points by hazelnut-tree 4y ago

Group_B 4y ago
Great prediction from Cy Endfield at the end. How all this new technology could easily enable a new form of totalitarianism, while on the other hand it allows new levels of decentralization the world had never seen before.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  I'd really like to know if that was part of a longer interview or if it was recorded specifically for this segment. It seems incongruous in the theme of the piece itself though. The quote, which I'm not finding elsewhere online: If we do it all wrong then it could be an absolute disaster. It's the biggest aid to totalitarianism you could ever come across, if you think about it, and that must be avoided at all costs. On the other hand it's the greatest boon to decentralisation and people fulfilling themselves. -- Cy Endfield
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Correction, that quote is by Barrie Sherman, not Endfield. Sherman has a book with Phillip Judkins: Glimpses of heaven, visions of hell : virtual reality and its implications London : Coronet, 1993. Summary: The authors ask what virtual reality is and the effects it may have on our lives. They look at the technology, finance, designers, manufacturers and users; and at the consequences of VR in the workplace, in education, in military and medical establishments and on the wider shores of recreation. https://www.worldcat.org/title/glimpses-of-heaven-visions-of-hell-virtual-reality-and-its-implications/oclc/925344366 https://www.worldcat.org/title/glimpses-of-heaven-visions-of...
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      And a few of Sherman's books at Archive.org: https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Sherman%2C+Barrie%22 https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Sherman%2C...
daenz 4y ago
The example of a mother working from home[0] feels very modern. It's strange to know that we drifted away from that direction at some point. 0. https://youtu.be/b6URa-PTqfA?t=303 https://youtu.be/b6URa-PTqfA?t=303
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  > Linda is in the forefront of perhaps the biggest revolution for working mothers since the pill Times have definitely changed
ggm 4y ago
During this time, 'secretarial services' were still a thing, and women (and it was predominantly women) did WPM tests (words per minute) to qualify for a role in the office. I remember the noise of the IBM Selectrics in serried ranks in banks, and in offices. Amazing to think we worked just fine on a turn-around time of an hour to get a document done. Also, this was a window when the printers unions in the Uk were going on strike as the first journalist-direct-entry systems were coming into the news print business. Rupert Murdoch went full bore with a new clean build, shut down the old printing, and locked them out. Huge strikes, police on horseback, riots. ICL was trying to sell the home office/desktop office concept, it was still very much about the styling of a giant desk/cab with a tiny monitor and built in printer, and the key issue was the quality of the keyboard (as ever) It turns out that seeing more than one line of input in a buffer helps. Who knew?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- b112 4y ago
  This is like the difference between a bow, and a crossbow. One takes years to be an expert, the other weeks or months. Same with a typewriter, vs a wordprocessor + printer. Imagine, typing entire documents fast, with no typos, whiteout, or correction capability. That's expertise, that's learned skill. No wonder a word processor, even in the early days of dot matrix or daisy wheel printing, was preferred.
  - ggm 4y ago
    The daisywheel printer was a scarce resource at work, the first daisy wheel typewriter was pretty much coveted by the few cogniscenti who were already up to speed with changing the head on an IBM golfball. We were expected to proofread the living bejesus out of our stuff from RUNOFF (the pre-troff but very similar word processor which was on a Dec-10 amongst other things) on lineprinter, before queueing up to print it out on daisywheel. The paper was very satisfying fanfold with increadibly fine edge strips with the sprocket feed, tearing it back into loose sheets before binding was great. Well.. right up until you spotted a typo and had to go back and adjust the markup.
asciimov 4y ago
If you want to be absolutely infuriated at the current state of technology, watch and listen to someone who uses a word processor all day for their job. My partner is in research publications, so much of their daily workflow could be improved if the various software packages could interact with each other. Word can’t do layouts, so you gotta use some Adobe product for that, but some parts don’t let you copy in outside text, gotta retype it. If you want to update a graph, instead of clicking on the chart to update the data you have to go through 3 or more programs to get a publication ready image. Never mind there isn’t a git equivalent in the space.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- zeven7 4y ago
  git is one thing I've really wanted to introduce to my wife, who is an author, but she's so tied to Word and there's just nothing I've found that ties the two technologies together well (I have tried a couple options, but they were disappointing)
  - b112 4y ago
    Hmm. On Linux, you could turn on autosave, then tie it in with a short script for inotify + auto checkin + update. Very messy I guess, would probably be easier to write a patch for libreoffice, tied into undo/redo edit history. Seems like a killer feature for some people. Infinite rollback. Would work best in an optional separate window, so you could copy historic text back in.
    - adtac 4y ago
      this is literally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 all over again. just use dropbox, they have file history.
      - b112 4y ago
        My second part (OOo tie in), would be too much in this case. Imagine a full file upload every change. Instead, having a git style history for edits, right in OOo would be awesome. Maybe a ${filename}.hist file for each file. You could exclude this from git/svn/dropbox whatever backups too, so only purposeful saves get sent upstream. The GUI interface, its nuances would be key here. Imagine being able to open the history window, scroll to, or search text of all changes, then click and be taken to the location in current document, with a placement option once there. That's next gen history, and gp is right, why isn't this a thing?
analog31 4y ago
It seems to me that we've reached Peak Word Processor. I followed what my kids were doing as they went through school. Even in grade school, they were required to learn word processing as if their "careers" depended on it. They had to follow strict formatting instructions such as line spacing and page margins for documents that would never be printed. The word processors that they learned on are of course obsolete and forgotten now. At the workplace, it definitely depends on one's field. When I started at my job 25 years ago, people still word processed and printed a lot of documents. Today, most text is entered in the e-mail or chat editor. If someone wants to spin up a document, they pull up whatever editor is provided by the workplace, or Google Docs, but the problem of finding out how to use all of the formatting features is bypassed by just not using those features. Text has gotten more informal. Graphics are added by using a screen shot capture utility. Meanwhile, the techies are using Markdown, and even the word processors (or whatever online editors) recognize Markdown tags and automatically apply formatting.
- throwaway787544 4y ago
  As a techie who writes a lot of docs, I kinda hate Markdown. I use Markdown for all my to-do lists and notes, but it sucks balls at conveying complex information in compact form and being readable. Any good docs written with it need touching up to be easier to read. With 10-20 additional formatting functions it would be decent. Meanwhile, most word processors have crappy UX and require training to figure out the mystic incantations to get the presentation right, and then screw it up at save/export time. We could definitely do better.
  - gumby 4y ago
    It was intended to be a simple way to type a few html tags from a time when there weren’t many. The idea was if you needed more you’d switch to a “real” tool. Which is a long explanation for “your needs exceed the capabilities of that tool, and thus your dislike is rational.” The various extensions that add additional capabilities, such as the ones you describe always force me to consult documentation (which kind of defeats the purpose) and, as you note, they all suck balls.
codetiger 4y ago
Did I just hear "Transfers at high speed"? :) And I just edited the text twice before sending. :)
eric4smith 4y ago
Kind of interesting that a lot of the work in the world nowadays is largely "throwaway" knowledge work. Use word processors to create more documents for people who do more knowledge work so that they can get better at doing it. Sigh. There was a time when most of the work was not knowledge work. And we are sitting on the back of that right now. Literally *EVERYTHING* we do was the kind of work where people had to sit together or commute to get it done in groups each day. "Mom's going to the office" meant something. Sure most work is back-breaking or mind-numbing. But someone has to do it. And our parents did it. And because of them, we are entitled enough to say that we all deserve to work from home.
- nindalf 4y ago
  You seem to misunderstand the importance of knowledge building on previous knowledge. That’s the foundation of productivity gains and the engine of economic growth for centuries - learning to do things better. An example of this I read elsewhere - Alex Honnold climbed a mountain with no safety equipment in 4 hours when it took weeks and plenty of safety gear a century ago. What changed? It was knowledge that people shared that made them more productive. Not just climbing routes, but fitness and dietary knowledge. For example, Honnold does yoga to stay in shape, which few climbers were doing back then. So when you say “real work” instead of “throwaway”, you’re underestimating how important knowledge is.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    > An example of this I read elsewhere - Alex Honnold climbed a mountain with no safety equipment in 4 hours when it took weeks and plenty of safety gear a century ago. What changed? It was knowledge that people shared that made them more productive. Not just climbing routes, but fitness and dietary knowledge. For example, Honnold does yoga to stay in shape, which few climbers were doing back then. I think you're mixing up some things Honnold has talked about here.. modern science (regarding training and nutrition), climbing gear, and climbing analysis (techniques used to further the sport of climbing) have enabled modern climbers to climb things that were considered impossible even 20 years ago. A 5.9 (considered the hardest possible grade 40 years ago) is now considered fairly casual and can be free climbed (not the same as free soloed) by people with less than a year of training. Freerider in Yosemite, Honnold's most famous free solo, didn't get a first free ascent until 1998. The time required to climb these things may have gone down also as a result of better equipment, but free soloing is a very niche subset of climbing. It's always been much faster than protected climbing. Honnold's specific training enabled him to climb it without protection (the one time anyway), but it's not a thing even most professional climbers would aspire to. They're mostly focused on harder grades, though outdoor speed climbing has a bit of a scene too (but still involves some protection)
forgotusername6 4y ago
The most astonishing thing in the video was being able to get a mortgage from the council. I had no idea that was ever possible. Apparently local authorities once had 16% of the mortgage market.
dav_Oz 4y ago
>Look at the French very very imaginative. They are providing over 30 million terminals in homes, free of charge, despite the fact they are going to cost something about £40 each because it is cheaper than producing telephone directories. And once the terminal is in, once it's there, the incentive is to use it for other things, obviously. So, it's marvelous marketing. It is cheaper over time for the French than bring out telephone directories every 2 years. You just plug in to the central computer, you find your numbers at the same time you can find all sorts of other things. You'll be using word processors and text processors as information units as links in an information chain, not just to type. And when that happens, when you can get the technology into the home, when you can get the technology away from the office, when you have word processors and text processors talking to other text processors and that point you don't need the middleman or -woman, do you? He is referring to the very successful story of Minitel[0](Videotex) which began to be implemented widely in 1982. It is relatively unknown outside of France but in France just part of their naturally shared "(3516-)" IT history; peaking in 2000 with around 25 million users (40% of the population). Xavier Niel, a french billionaire, made his first million by launching a "sex oriented chat service" colloquially known as Minitel rose in 1987 at the age of 19. For [1] anyone who wants to dig deeper into that very peculiar french history. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel [1]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HOhK9bgQo8g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HOhK9bgQo8g
billpg 4y ago
Councils (local government) did mortgages?
open-source-ux 4y ago
A couple of thoughts... Alternatives to typing I'm really intrigued by the one-hand typing device shown at the 8 min mark in the video. I'm impressed the inventor of the Microwriter wrote an entire book in the one-hand typing device. The narrator say it took him about 30 minutes to achieve competence in using the device. Word processors (WP) By the early 1990s (maybe earlier), GUI word processors were widespread, but the word processor does not seem to have changed much since then. The past 15+ years has been about implementing word processors in the browser (with fewer feaures than the more powerful 30+ older desktop word processors). Progress? Or re-inventing the WP again in the browser?

166 points by hazelnut-tree 4y ago

Great prediction from Cy Endfield at the end. How all this new technology could easily enable a new form of totalitarianism, while on the other hand it allows new levels of decentralization the world had never seen before.

dredmorbius 4y ago
I'd really like to know if that was part of a longer interview or if it was recorded specifically for this segment. It seems incongruous in the theme of the piece itself though. The quote, which I'm not finding elsewhere online: If we do it all wrong then it could be an absolute disaster. It's the biggest aid to totalitarianism you could ever come across, if you think about it, and that must be avoided at all costs. On the other hand it's the greatest boon to decentralisation and people fulfilling themselves. -- Cy Endfield
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Correction, that quote is by Barrie Sherman, not Endfield. Sherman has a book with Phillip Judkins: Glimpses of heaven, visions of hell : virtual reality and its implications London : Coronet, 1993. Summary: The authors ask what virtual reality is and the effects it may have on our lives. They look at the technology, finance, designers, manufacturers and users; and at the consequences of VR in the workplace, in education, in military and medical establishments and on the wider shores of recreation. https://www.worldcat.org/title/glimpses-of-heaven-visions-of-hell-virtual-reality-and-its-implications/oclc/925344366 https://www.worldcat.org/title/glimpses-of-heaven-visions-of...
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    And a few of Sherman's books at Archive.org: https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Sherman%2C+Barrie%22 https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Sherman%2C...

daenz 4y ago

The example of a mother working from home[0] feels very modern. It's strange to know that we drifted away from that direction at some point. 0. https://youtu.be/b6URa-PTqfA?t=303 https://youtu.be/b6URa-PTqfA?t=303

pcthrowaway 4y ago
> Linda is in the forefront of perhaps the biggest revolution for working mothers since the pill Times have definitely changed

ggm 4y ago

During this time, 'secretarial services' were still a thing, and women (and it was predominantly women) did WPM tests (words per minute) to qualify for a role in the office. I remember the noise of the IBM Selectrics in serried ranks in banks, and in offices. Amazing to think we worked just fine on a turn-around time of an hour to get a document done. Also, this was a window when the printers unions in the Uk were going on strike as the first journalist-direct-entry systems were coming into the news print business. Rupert Murdoch went full bore with a new clean build, shut down the old printing, and locked them out. Huge strikes, police on horseback, riots. ICL was trying to sell the home office/desktop office concept, it was still very much about the styling of a giant desk/cab with a tiny monitor and built in printer, and the key issue was the quality of the keyboard (as ever) It turns out that seeing more than one line of input in a buffer helps. Who knew?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
b112 4y ago
This is like the difference between a bow, and a crossbow. One takes years to be an expert, the other weeks or months. Same with a typewriter, vs a wordprocessor + printer. Imagine, typing entire documents fast, with no typos, whiteout, or correction capability. That's expertise, that's learned skill. No wonder a word processor, even in the early days of dot matrix or daisy wheel printing, was preferred.
- ggm 4y ago
  The daisywheel printer was a scarce resource at work, the first daisy wheel typewriter was pretty much coveted by the few cogniscenti who were already up to speed with changing the head on an IBM golfball. We were expected to proofread the living bejesus out of our stuff from RUNOFF (the pre-troff but very similar word processor which was on a Dec-10 amongst other things) on lineprinter, before queueing up to print it out on daisywheel. The paper was very satisfying fanfold with increadibly fine edge strips with the sprocket feed, tearing it back into loose sheets before binding was great. Well.. right up until you spotted a typo and had to go back and adjust the markup.

asciimov 4y ago

If you want to be absolutely infuriated at the current state of technology, watch and listen to someone who uses a word processor all day for their job. My partner is in research publications, so much of their daily workflow could be improved if the various software packages could interact with each other. Word can’t do layouts, so you gotta use some Adobe product for that, but some parts don’t let you copy in outside text, gotta retype it. If you want to update a graph, instead of clicking on the chart to update the data you have to go through 3 or more programs to get a publication ready image. Never mind there isn’t a git equivalent in the space.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zeven7 4y ago
git is one thing I've really wanted to introduce to my wife, who is an author, but she's so tied to Word and there's just nothing I've found that ties the two technologies together well (I have tried a couple options, but they were disappointing)
- b112 4y ago
  Hmm. On Linux, you could turn on autosave, then tie it in with a short script for inotify + auto checkin + update. Very messy I guess, would probably be easier to write a patch for libreoffice, tied into undo/redo edit history. Seems like a killer feature for some people. Infinite rollback. Would work best in an optional separate window, so you could copy historic text back in.
  - adtac 4y ago
    this is literally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 all over again. just use dropbox, they have file history.
    - b112 4y ago
      My second part (OOo tie in), would be too much in this case. Imagine a full file upload every change. Instead, having a git style history for edits, right in OOo would be awesome. Maybe a ${filename}.hist file for each file. You could exclude this from git/svn/dropbox whatever backups too, so only purposeful saves get sent upstream. The GUI interface, its nuances would be key here. Imagine being able to open the history window, scroll to, or search text of all changes, then click and be taken to the location in current document, with a placement option once there. That's next gen history, and gp is right, why isn't this a thing?

analog31 4y ago

It seems to me that we've reached Peak Word Processor. I followed what my kids were doing as they went through school. Even in grade school, they were required to learn word processing as if their "careers" depended on it. They had to follow strict formatting instructions such as line spacing and page margins for documents that would never be printed. The word processors that they learned on are of course obsolete and forgotten now. At the workplace, it definitely depends on one's field. When I started at my job 25 years ago, people still word processed and printed a lot of documents. Today, most text is entered in the e-mail or chat editor. If someone wants to spin up a document, they pull up whatever editor is provided by the workplace, or Google Docs, but the problem of finding out how to use all of the formatting features is bypassed by just not using those features. Text has gotten more informal. Graphics are added by using a screen shot capture utility. Meanwhile, the techies are using Markdown, and even the word processors (or whatever online editors) recognize Markdown tags and automatically apply formatting.

throwaway787544 4y ago
As a techie who writes a lot of docs, I kinda hate Markdown. I use Markdown for all my to-do lists and notes, but it sucks balls at conveying complex information in compact form and being readable. Any good docs written with it need touching up to be easier to read. With 10-20 additional formatting functions it would be decent. Meanwhile, most word processors have crappy UX and require training to figure out the mystic incantations to get the presentation right, and then screw it up at save/export time. We could definitely do better.
- gumby 4y ago
  It was intended to be a simple way to type a few html tags from a time when there weren’t many. The idea was if you needed more you’d switch to a “real” tool. Which is a long explanation for “your needs exceed the capabilities of that tool, and thus your dislike is rational.” The various extensions that add additional capabilities, such as the ones you describe always force me to consult documentation (which kind of defeats the purpose) and, as you note, they all suck balls.

codetiger 4y ago

Did I just hear "Transfers at high speed"? :) And I just edited the text twice before sending. :)

eric4smith 4y ago

Kind of interesting that a lot of the work in the world nowadays is largely "throwaway" knowledge work. Use word processors to create more documents for people who do more knowledge work so that they can get better at doing it. Sigh. There was a time when most of the work was not knowledge work. And we are sitting on the back of that right now. Literally *EVERYTHING* we do was the kind of work where people had to sit together or commute to get it done in groups each day. "Mom's going to the office" meant something. Sure most work is back-breaking or mind-numbing. But someone has to do it. And our parents did it. And because of them, we are entitled enough to say that we all deserve to work from home.

nindalf 4y ago
You seem to misunderstand the importance of knowledge building on previous knowledge. That’s the foundation of productivity gains and the engine of economic growth for centuries - learning to do things better. An example of this I read elsewhere - Alex Honnold climbed a mountain with no safety equipment in 4 hours when it took weeks and plenty of safety gear a century ago. What changed? It was knowledge that people shared that made them more productive. Not just climbing routes, but fitness and dietary knowledge. For example, Honnold does yoga to stay in shape, which few climbers were doing back then. So when you say “real work” instead of “throwaway”, you’re underestimating how important knowledge is.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  > An example of this I read elsewhere - Alex Honnold climbed a mountain with no safety equipment in 4 hours when it took weeks and plenty of safety gear a century ago. What changed? It was knowledge that people shared that made them more productive. Not just climbing routes, but fitness and dietary knowledge. For example, Honnold does yoga to stay in shape, which few climbers were doing back then. I think you're mixing up some things Honnold has talked about here.. modern science (regarding training and nutrition), climbing gear, and climbing analysis (techniques used to further the sport of climbing) have enabled modern climbers to climb things that were considered impossible even 20 years ago. A 5.9 (considered the hardest possible grade 40 years ago) is now considered fairly casual and can be free climbed (not the same as free soloed) by people with less than a year of training. Freerider in Yosemite, Honnold's most famous free solo, didn't get a first free ascent until 1998. The time required to climb these things may have gone down also as a result of better equipment, but free soloing is a very niche subset of climbing. It's always been much faster than protected climbing. Honnold's specific training enabled him to climb it without protection (the one time anyway), but it's not a thing even most professional climbers would aspire to. They're mostly focused on harder grades, though outdoor speed climbing has a bit of a scene too (but still involves some protection)

forgotusername6 4y ago

The most astonishing thing in the video was being able to get a mortgage from the council. I had no idea that was ever possible. Apparently local authorities once had 16% of the mortgage market.

dav_Oz 4y ago

>Look at the French very very imaginative. They are providing over 30 million terminals in homes, free of charge, despite the fact they are going to cost something about £40 each because it is cheaper than producing telephone directories. And once the terminal is in, once it's there, the incentive is to use it for other things, obviously. So, it's marvelous marketing. It is cheaper over time for the French than bring out telephone directories every 2 years. You just plug in to the central computer, you find your numbers at the same time you can find all sorts of other things. You'll be using word processors and text processors as information units as links in an information chain, not just to type. And when that happens, when you can get the technology into the home, when you can get the technology away from the office, when you have word processors and text processors talking to other text processors and that point you don't need the middleman or -woman, do you? He is referring to the very successful story of Minitel[0](Videotex) which began to be implemented widely in 1982. It is relatively unknown outside of France but in France just part of their naturally shared "(3516-)" IT history; peaking in 2000 with around 25 million users (40% of the population). Xavier Niel, a french billionaire, made his first million by launching a "sex oriented chat service" colloquially known as Minitel rose in 1987 at the age of 19. For [1] anyone who wants to dig deeper into that very peculiar french history. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel [1]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HOhK9bgQo8g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HOhK9bgQo8g

billpg 4y ago

Councils (local government) did mortgages?

open-source-ux 4y ago

A couple of thoughts... Alternatives to typing I'm really intrigued by the one-hand typing device shown at the 8 min mark in the video. I'm impressed the inventor of the Microwriter wrote an entire book in the one-hand typing device. The narrator say it took him about 30 minutes to achieve competence in using the device. Word processors (WP) By the early 1990s (maybe earlier), GUI word processors were widespread, but the word processor does not seem to have changed much since then. The past 15+ years has been about implementing word processors in the browser (with fewer feaures than the more powerful 30+ older desktop word processors). Progress? Or re-inventing the WP again in the browser?