6 ms·

Author does say word processors "like" MacWrite, so falls short of saying it was the first at anything (and it wasn't), but WordPerfect and WordStar are interes

Author does say word processors "like" MacWrite, so falls short of saying it was the first at anything (and it wasn't), but WordPerfect and WordStar are interesting choices for comparison. Of the three, only MacWrite is a GUI-based WYSIWYG word processor that would be immediately familiar to modern audiences. (WordPerfect wouldn't get GUI until 1991.)

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Yeah, this. I mean, look, WordStar was a huge step up from a typewriter. It (and programs like it) made it possible for people like me to write. WordStar let you get the words right. WordPerfect let you do "you asked for it, you got it" layout, which was a step up. But MacWrite and programs like it let you do WYSIWYG layout, which was huge. It was like going from typewriter to WordStar, but for layout and appearance. (The words are still more important, but the presentation also matters.)
- Kon-Peki 2y ago
  I always wonder how many people actually used typewriters before talking about them in comparison to word processors. By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so you could erase mistakes. You could set them to center or right justify text. You could create tables of justified text. Early word processing software was amazing because it gave you more memory to work with, and didn't force you to keep so much of what you previously wrote in your head. But it was only a large step forward compared to typewriters of the time. WYSIWYG blew all of that out of the water.
  - matwood 2y ago
    I learned to type on an electric typewriter :) It wasn't a fancy word processing one with memory, but just that the hammers struck the paper using a motor making it easier to type. It also made a very satisfying 'thunk' which I would randomly trigger while the teacher was talking that in turn caused me to get thrown out of class a number of times.
  - phil21 2y ago
    It's also technology was much less ubiquitous back then and less evenly distributed, at least in my experience. I went from a mechanical typewriter which had the whiteout tape as it's only "advanced" feature, directly to a WYSIWYG editor. It was absolutely night and day. I only saw an "advanced" electronic typewriter later in life at my grandparents house, which was used rarely and only for her accounting business as it was so expensive when they first bought it. As far as I know my experience was pretty much normal for my peer group - as my school had a similar setup. As a kid in school, it was amazing going from having to totally re-type a rough draft to being able to make some casual edits and hit print. Hours saved for each paper, especially with the typing skills I had back then!
    - wjnc 2y ago
      Most 70s-80s advanced typewriter were just not regular household material. Even among white collar jobs. My parents (and mini me) worked on very mediocre type writers, until my dad got a PC from work with WordPerfect. Interesting from an economical perspective is that the 'top' typewriters were a lot more affordable than early pc's. People just didn't buy them. What they had was good enough, regardless of features. My dad ended up so enthusiastic for PC's to later spend more than a monthly wage on a PC for the family (actually: me). Every two years. Incredible, especially compared to the afforability of digital devices nowadays. Word processing software was to writing as smartphones were to photography, or as the book press was to writing. Perhaps not transformational on a per feature basis, but transformational on grounds of the possibilities and market it unlocked.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    > By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so you could erase mistakes. Sure, there were electronic typewriters where you could type an entire line or two into memory before printing it. And, as you say, typewriters with whiteout reels that allowed you to backspace. But if you've started a new paragraph, and you realise you want to go back and edit the previous one, and everything else needs to move down a line to accommodate? Good chance you're throwing the page away and starting from scratch. Or you're cutting and pasting in the literal sense, using scissors and glue. Typewriters were difficult enough that "typist" was a professional job - and many workers wouldn't do their own typing, instead recording messages onto tiny tape cassettes for a typist to type up later on. There were even foot-pedal-controlled cassette players, so typists could type with their hands and control the dictaphone tape with their feet!
    - Kon-Peki 2y ago
      Early word-processing software changed very little of that. I maintain that this kind of software was like typewriters on steroids, with a screen. WYSIWYG software was an entirely new paradigm, and changed everything.
      - adamc 2y ago
        Even Word Perfect was much, much better at this than a typewriter. What made it hard to use was that you had to memorize a bunch of special function keybindings, as I recall. Yes, GUI word processors were much better than this, but even Word Perfect looked compelling compared to using a typewriter. I wrote a bunch of papers using a typewriter. Standard operating procedure was to plan out the complete paper, basically as a tree of bullet points (I used index cards), and then turn those into sentences at the typewriter. All the writing/reorganization had to happen before you sat down to type.
        tiahura 2y ago
        you had to memorize a bunch of special function keybindings Keyboard templates were pretty ubiquitous.
  - adamc 2y ago
    I wrote papers in graduate school using a typewriter before switching to a Mac Plus. It was a Smith-Corona and used a cartridge "ribbon" and a special "correction ribbon" that lifted off the text (instead of using white-out). It wasn't a Selectric, though, so mostly you just used it as a typewriter. Selectrics were expensive and mostly used in business rather than by individuals. Even the IBM Selectrics were nothing like as good as having a word processor, which is why the transition was so fast. A friend of mine was in commercial real-estate in that period (mid-1980s) and discovered that with a computer, he could type his own offer letters and not have to bother with a secretary. My brother's law firm went through something similar. In a handful of years, there was huge adoption.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      A student organization I was an officer in had a Selectric with a correcting ribbon and I ended up using it for a lot of papers latterly. The newspaper had Royal typewriters and I used those. We did a bunch of literal copy/pasting and then stuff was typed into a huge typesetting system. Grad school (starting 1979), there was a mainframe with DecWriter terminals and that was a big improvement but still nothing like terminal GUIs.
    - Clamchop 2y ago
      Selectrics never had any word processor-like functionality aside from the ability to erase. They were very expensive for being just amazing pieces of mechanical engineering but the daisy wheel products worked well enough and could be infused with a little computerized help because they were already electronic.
  - xena 2y ago
    Hi, author of the article here. I do most of my drafting of these longer articles on a Freewrite Alpha, which is effectively an electronic typewriter. When I use it I have one rule: the backspace key is banned. This makes me restate my thoughts if I make a typo or just bulldoze through it. I find that this makes me make better drafts in the process.
    - quesera 2y ago
      Yikes. You might be blessed with a brain for written communication. If I did not allow myself revision and improvement to my written text, everything I write would read like a spoken monologue, and be multiple times longer than necessary to convey my message.
      - xena 2y ago
        There is a reason I do _extensive_ editing after the fact, here's the draft for Soylent Green is people [1]: https://gist.github.com/Xe/3fe0236412c1ce16389bfcd6c6562d7a https://gist.github.com/Xe/3fe0236412c1ce16389bfcd6c6562d7a The differences I added in editing are _vast_ and really transform the work from a ranty mess that approaches readability to something that's worthy of publishing. I have another article about AI coming out about how we could use generative AI to make art that we've never seen before, but it's mostly used for AI slop. I'm in the middle of ranting it out into the typewriter. It's bad currently, but I make it bad first so I can remake it better later. Here's an excerpt of the intro that I'm going to be rewriting. This is the "raw clay" that I mold in editing. > I like creating things. There's a lot of joy in being able to sit there, think about a thing, and then make that thing come into existence. This is something I really enjoy doing and I'm blessed to be able to do that as my job in DevRel. > One of the core conflicts that i end up having with the stuff I create is that I am a bit more artistically minded than people would expect out of the gate. I mean, I get it. Tech isn't really known for *art*, it's a lot more known for being the barrier between you and artists you want to follow. > Howeever I've ended up seeing kind of a disturbing pattern with AI tools that are meant or at least intended to aid people in the creation of art: they're almost always used to create infinite slop machines without a lick of art in the process. Today I'm going to talk about this fundamental conflict between two categories: art and content. Art is that which conveys, inspires and tells stories. Content is what goes between the ads so that media moguls can see their profit lines go up. I want to argue that a lot of what AI tools are actually being used for is content that is gussied up as if it is art. If you want to see what the entire writing process looks like after it festers for a while in my head, I wrote out the holy grail article on Twitch: https://youtu.be/N_KNpVujAL8 https://youtu.be/N_KNpVujAL8 [1]: https://xeiaso.net/blog/2024/soylent-green-people/ https://xeiaso.net/blog/2024/soylent-green-people/
  - analog31 2y ago
    I did. I used my mom's typewriter, which she typed her thesis on in the 1950s, and switched to word processing on a college owned TRS-80 before getting an MS-DOS machine of my own. The big breakthrough was editing. WYSIWIG didn't solve a problem in that space. College papers didn't need different fonts, and it was sufficient to let the computer take care of formatting, like using Markdown. I'm not dismissing the Apple, but it was priced out of my reach in 1984.
    - solomonb 2y ago
      > I used my mom's typewriter, which she typed her thesis on in the 1950s The point was that later typewriters had a features like memory, automatic indentation and erasing that were not available in 1950s era typewriters..
      - analog31 2y ago
        Yes, but nobody was buying those for personal or student use, and the really cheap ones came later.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      In Southern Europe Apple hardware has always been the most expensive one among systems for home users. Hence why I had to wait until university to actually see them outside computer magazines, and only one room had them on the computer labs, versus the whole campus filled with PCs and UNIX terminals.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    As someone alive back then, they were also quite expensive, and only a few had them. I bought my typewriter around 1990, a plain classical one, where I threw lots of paper away, learn to use corrector tape and ink to save them.
  - efitz 2y ago
    I learned typing on an IBM Selectric, my parents made me take a typing course before they would buy a computer. White-out or correction tape was how we fixed typos (or just didn't make them). If you were smart you wrote your words out longhand before typing them; you didn't "think" while typing. The early computerized typewriters kinda sucked - you could do line level edits but the print quality was dot matrix or worse.
  - marssaxman 2y ago
    > By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. Were such fancy machines actually common? I never saw one. For me, it was all "CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK oops! damn", until it was a whole new world with MacWrite and the ImageWriter.
  - taylodl 2y ago
    Such typewriters were used by business, not students or individuals at home. Those machines cost several thousand dollars in today's dollars, just to put a perspective on things. Whereas a "normal", manual typewriter cost several hundred dollars in today's dollars. Most of us therefore had a manual typewriter. Touch typing was out of the question! Let alone any fancy-schmancy word processing! Boy, oh boy were the early gen word processors a godsend!
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  So you're saying MacWrite's beautiful graphical WYSIWYG layout is better than WordPerfect's cheap practical TOYOTA layout, which is a step up from WordStar's blocky brutalist CYBER TRUCK layout. ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVHg1CjqLk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVHg1CjqLk8
leptons 2y ago
And before Macwrite, or Macintosh computers existed, there was Xerox PARC and their GUI-based WYSIWYG editor called "Bravo", which Steve Jobs no doubt would have seen when he visited PARC.
- RichardCA 2y ago
  That historic moment has been dramatized at least once. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u70CgBr-OI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u70CgBr-OI
  - sgerenser 2y ago
    I noticed Alan Kay himself in the comments, indicating about the only thing in the scene that is accurate is the guy playing Steve Jobs (Noah Wyle) looks/sounds similar to the real Jobs. Everything else was pure Hollywood fluff.
- homarp 2y ago
  'Bravo' was produced at Xerox PARC by Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi and colleagues in 1974. Then Charles went to Microsoft where he started and led Microsoft's applications group, where he built the first versions of Microsoft Office
WillAdams 2y ago
It's interesting to note that when WordPerfect got a GUI, it had to be worked up separately for each platform --- the NeXTstep version was quite nice, took full advantage of Display PostScript, and was coded up by a couple of programmers in six weeks or so.
- wat10000 2y ago
  That’s how cross-platform apps were. Middleware libraries that you could use to put the same GUI code on different OSes didn’t exist, and there wasn’t room for them anyway. Even sharing the core could be a tough proposition. I know that at least MS Word for Mac vs Windows was two completely separate programs that happened to share a name and a feature set. That continued until Mac MS Word 6.0 in 1994. That was a port of the Windows version, and very much disliked among the Mac userbase for being poor performance and not really behaving like a Mac app should. I don’t think cross-platform UI code really took off on the Mac until maybe 20 years later. Plenty of Mac apps were built that way before that point, but they tended to be ones in the “you’re stuck using this, so it doesn’t have to be very nice” category, like Word ended up being. It doesn’t really seem to have tipped until Electron came along, and somehow web apps that use half a gigabyte of RAM to show some text became totally accepted as good enough. Incidentally, the Cocoa UI framework that macOS uses was originally a cross platform framework that could deploy to Windows and various other OSes, back when it was made by NeXT. Apple. Apple killed that off and it became Mac-exclusive. I wonder what the world would look like if they kept support for other OSes. Maybe we’d have a good selection of cross platform apps that actually look nice and perform well.
  - mjevans 2y ago
    Real damage of Microsoft's Monopoly power. They have a severe case of Not Invented Here syndrome and even for free Open Source Software refuse to ship any of it naively unless they can fork it and pretend they wrote it (early TCP code based off BSD IIRC). It's horrendously tough to target for a cross-platform application when you have to bring the entire GUI toolkit along and adapt it individually to every target, even the 95% of the market gorilla that is whatever versions of Desktop Windows are the most recent 3.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
But the example functionality is backspacing, which of course in no way requires a GUI. You could just as easily cite AtariWriter or Bank Street Writer, which came out before WordPerfect.
blihp 2y ago
It was implied by the phrase 'transformed the ways everyone used computers'. True, to younger computer users MacWrite would be the most familiar of the three. However, in terms of total unit sales and percentage of users for their day, MacWrite was practically rounding error in the word processor market. It was WordStar and then WordPerfect that dominated (and therefore 'transformed...') until the early/mid-90's when MS Word took over.
- turnsout 2y ago
  The point stands—we don't use the descendants of TUI word processors today. We essentially all use GUIs.
ja27 2y ago
WordPerfect for classic MacOS came out in 1988. It always felt like they bought someone else's product but apparently it was an in-house port.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

Yeah, this. I mean, look, WordStar was a huge step up from a typewriter. It (and programs like it) made it possible for people like me to write. WordStar let you get the words right. WordPerfect let you do "you asked for it, you got it" layout, which was a step up. But MacWrite and programs like it let you do WYSIWYG layout, which was huge. It was like going from typewriter to WordStar, but for layout and appearance. (The words are still more important, but the presentation also matters.)

Kon-Peki 2y ago
I always wonder how many people actually used typewriters before talking about them in comparison to word processors. By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so you could erase mistakes. You could set them to center or right justify text. You could create tables of justified text. Early word processing software was amazing because it gave you more memory to work with, and didn't force you to keep so much of what you previously wrote in your head. But it was only a large step forward compared to typewriters of the time. WYSIWYG blew all of that out of the water.
- matwood 2y ago
  I learned to type on an electric typewriter :) It wasn't a fancy word processing one with memory, but just that the hammers struck the paper using a motor making it easier to type. It also made a very satisfying 'thunk' which I would randomly trigger while the teacher was talking that in turn caused me to get thrown out of class a number of times.
- phil21 2y ago
  It's also technology was much less ubiquitous back then and less evenly distributed, at least in my experience. I went from a mechanical typewriter which had the whiteout tape as it's only "advanced" feature, directly to a WYSIWYG editor. It was absolutely night and day. I only saw an "advanced" electronic typewriter later in life at my grandparents house, which was used rarely and only for her accounting business as it was so expensive when they first bought it. As far as I know my experience was pretty much normal for my peer group - as my school had a similar setup. As a kid in school, it was amazing going from having to totally re-type a rough draft to being able to make some casual edits and hit print. Hours saved for each paper, especially with the typing skills I had back then!
  - wjnc 2y ago
    Most 70s-80s advanced typewriter were just not regular household material. Even among white collar jobs. My parents (and mini me) worked on very mediocre type writers, until my dad got a PC from work with WordPerfect. Interesting from an economical perspective is that the 'top' typewriters were a lot more affordable than early pc's. People just didn't buy them. What they had was good enough, regardless of features. My dad ended up so enthusiastic for PC's to later spend more than a monthly wage on a PC for the family (actually: me). Every two years. Incredible, especially compared to the afforability of digital devices nowadays. Word processing software was to writing as smartphones were to photography, or as the book press was to writing. Perhaps not transformational on a per feature basis, but transformational on grounds of the possibilities and market it unlocked.
- michaelt 2y ago
  > By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so you could erase mistakes. Sure, there were electronic typewriters where you could type an entire line or two into memory before printing it. And, as you say, typewriters with whiteout reels that allowed you to backspace. But if you've started a new paragraph, and you realise you want to go back and edit the previous one, and everything else needs to move down a line to accommodate? Good chance you're throwing the page away and starting from scratch. Or you're cutting and pasting in the literal sense, using scissors and glue. Typewriters were difficult enough that "typist" was a professional job - and many workers wouldn't do their own typing, instead recording messages onto tiny tape cassettes for a typist to type up later on. There were even foot-pedal-controlled cassette players, so typists could type with their hands and control the dictaphone tape with their feet!
  - Kon-Peki 2y ago
    Early word-processing software changed very little of that. I maintain that this kind of software was like typewriters on steroids, with a screen. WYSIWYG software was an entirely new paradigm, and changed everything.
    - adamc 2y ago
      Even Word Perfect was much, much better at this than a typewriter. What made it hard to use was that you had to memorize a bunch of special function keybindings, as I recall. Yes, GUI word processors were much better than this, but even Word Perfect looked compelling compared to using a typewriter. I wrote a bunch of papers using a typewriter. Standard operating procedure was to plan out the complete paper, basically as a tree of bullet points (I used index cards), and then turn those into sentences at the typewriter. All the writing/reorganization had to happen before you sat down to type.
      - tiahura 2y ago
        you had to memorize a bunch of special function keybindings Keyboard templates were pretty ubiquitous.
- adamc 2y ago
  I wrote papers in graduate school using a typewriter before switching to a Mac Plus. It was a Smith-Corona and used a cartridge "ribbon" and a special "correction ribbon" that lifted off the text (instead of using white-out). It wasn't a Selectric, though, so mostly you just used it as a typewriter. Selectrics were expensive and mostly used in business rather than by individuals. Even the IBM Selectrics were nothing like as good as having a word processor, which is why the transition was so fast. A friend of mine was in commercial real-estate in that period (mid-1980s) and discovered that with a computer, he could type his own offer letters and not have to bother with a secretary. My brother's law firm went through something similar. In a handful of years, there was huge adoption.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    A student organization I was an officer in had a Selectric with a correcting ribbon and I ended up using it for a lot of papers latterly. The newspaper had Royal typewriters and I used those. We did a bunch of literal copy/pasting and then stuff was typed into a huge typesetting system. Grad school (starting 1979), there was a mainframe with DecWriter terminals and that was a big improvement but still nothing like terminal GUIs.
  - Clamchop 2y ago
    Selectrics never had any word processor-like functionality aside from the ability to erase. They were very expensive for being just amazing pieces of mechanical engineering but the daisy wheel products worked well enough and could be infused with a little computerized help because they were already electronic.
- xena 2y ago
  Hi, author of the article here. I do most of my drafting of these longer articles on a Freewrite Alpha, which is effectively an electronic typewriter. When I use it I have one rule: the backspace key is banned. This makes me restate my thoughts if I make a typo or just bulldoze through it. I find that this makes me make better drafts in the process.
  - quesera 2y ago
    Yikes. You might be blessed with a brain for written communication. If I did not allow myself revision and improvement to my written text, everything I write would read like a spoken monologue, and be multiple times longer than necessary to convey my message.
    - xena 2y ago
      There is a reason I do _extensive_ editing after the fact, here's the draft for Soylent Green is people [1]: https://gist.github.com/Xe/3fe0236412c1ce16389bfcd6c6562d7a https://gist.github.com/Xe/3fe0236412c1ce16389bfcd6c6562d7a The differences I added in editing are _vast_ and really transform the work from a ranty mess that approaches readability to something that's worthy of publishing. I have another article about AI coming out about how we could use generative AI to make art that we've never seen before, but it's mostly used for AI slop. I'm in the middle of ranting it out into the typewriter. It's bad currently, but I make it bad first so I can remake it better later. Here's an excerpt of the intro that I'm going to be rewriting. This is the "raw clay" that I mold in editing. > I like creating things. There's a lot of joy in being able to sit there, think about a thing, and then make that thing come into existence. This is something I really enjoy doing and I'm blessed to be able to do that as my job in DevRel. > One of the core conflicts that i end up having with the stuff I create is that I am a bit more artistically minded than people would expect out of the gate. I mean, I get it. Tech isn't really known for *art*, it's a lot more known for being the barrier between you and artists you want to follow. > Howeever I've ended up seeing kind of a disturbing pattern with AI tools that are meant or at least intended to aid people in the creation of art: they're almost always used to create infinite slop machines without a lick of art in the process. Today I'm going to talk about this fundamental conflict between two categories: art and content. Art is that which conveys, inspires and tells stories. Content is what goes between the ads so that media moguls can see their profit lines go up. I want to argue that a lot of what AI tools are actually being used for is content that is gussied up as if it is art. If you want to see what the entire writing process looks like after it festers for a while in my head, I wrote out the holy grail article on Twitch: https://youtu.be/N_KNpVujAL8 https://youtu.be/N_KNpVujAL8 [1]: https://xeiaso.net/blog/2024/soylent-green-people/ https://xeiaso.net/blog/2024/soylent-green-people/
- analog31 2y ago
  I did. I used my mom's typewriter, which she typed her thesis on in the 1950s, and switched to word processing on a college owned TRS-80 before getting an MS-DOS machine of my own. The big breakthrough was editing. WYSIWIG didn't solve a problem in that space. College papers didn't need different fonts, and it was sufficient to let the computer take care of formatting, like using Markdown. I'm not dismissing the Apple, but it was priced out of my reach in 1984.
  - solomonb 2y ago
    > I used my mom's typewriter, which she typed her thesis on in the 1950s The point was that later typewriters had a features like memory, automatic indentation and erasing that were not available in 1950s era typewriters..
    - analog31 2y ago
      Yes, but nobody was buying those for personal or student use, and the really cheap ones came later.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    In Southern Europe Apple hardware has always been the most expensive one among systems for home users. Hence why I had to wait until university to actually see them outside computer magazines, and only one room had them on the computer labs, versus the whole campus filled with PCs and UNIX terminals.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  As someone alive back then, they were also quite expensive, and only a few had them. I bought my typewriter around 1990, a plain classical one, where I threw lots of paper away, learn to use corrector tape and ink to save them.
- efitz 2y ago
  I learned typing on an IBM Selectric, my parents made me take a typing course before they would buy a computer. White-out or correction tape was how we fixed typos (or just didn't make them). If you were smart you wrote your words out longhand before typing them; you didn't "think" while typing. The early computerized typewriters kinda sucked - you could do line level edits but the print quality was dot matrix or worse.
- marssaxman 2y ago
  > By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. Were such fancy machines actually common? I never saw one. For me, it was all "CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK oops! damn", until it was a whole new world with MacWrite and the ImageWriter.
- taylodl 2y ago
  Such typewriters were used by business, not students or individuals at home. Those machines cost several thousand dollars in today's dollars, just to put a perspective on things. Whereas a "normal", manual typewriter cost several hundred dollars in today's dollars. Most of us therefore had a manual typewriter. Touch typing was out of the question! Let alone any fancy-schmancy word processing! Boy, oh boy were the early gen word processors a godsend!
DonHopkins 2y ago
So you're saying MacWrite's beautiful graphical WYSIWYG layout is better than WordPerfect's cheap practical TOYOTA layout, which is a step up from WordStar's blocky brutalist CYBER TRUCK layout. ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVHg1CjqLk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVHg1CjqLk8

leptons 2y ago

And before Macwrite, or Macintosh computers existed, there was Xerox PARC and their GUI-based WYSIWYG editor called "Bravo", which Steve Jobs no doubt would have seen when he visited PARC.

RichardCA 2y ago
That historic moment has been dramatized at least once. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u70CgBr-OI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u70CgBr-OI
- sgerenser 2y ago
  I noticed Alan Kay himself in the comments, indicating about the only thing in the scene that is accurate is the guy playing Steve Jobs (Noah Wyle) looks/sounds similar to the real Jobs. Everything else was pure Hollywood fluff.
homarp 2y ago
'Bravo' was produced at Xerox PARC by Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi and colleagues in 1974. Then Charles went to Microsoft where he started and led Microsoft's applications group, where he built the first versions of Microsoft Office

WillAdams 2y ago

It's interesting to note that when WordPerfect got a GUI, it had to be worked up separately for each platform --- the NeXTstep version was quite nice, took full advantage of Display PostScript, and was coded up by a couple of programmers in six weeks or so.

wat10000 2y ago
That’s how cross-platform apps were. Middleware libraries that you could use to put the same GUI code on different OSes didn’t exist, and there wasn’t room for them anyway. Even sharing the core could be a tough proposition. I know that at least MS Word for Mac vs Windows was two completely separate programs that happened to share a name and a feature set. That continued until Mac MS Word 6.0 in 1994. That was a port of the Windows version, and very much disliked among the Mac userbase for being poor performance and not really behaving like a Mac app should. I don’t think cross-platform UI code really took off on the Mac until maybe 20 years later. Plenty of Mac apps were built that way before that point, but they tended to be ones in the “you’re stuck using this, so it doesn’t have to be very nice” category, like Word ended up being. It doesn’t really seem to have tipped until Electron came along, and somehow web apps that use half a gigabyte of RAM to show some text became totally accepted as good enough. Incidentally, the Cocoa UI framework that macOS uses was originally a cross platform framework that could deploy to Windows and various other OSes, back when it was made by NeXT. Apple. Apple killed that off and it became Mac-exclusive. I wonder what the world would look like if they kept support for other OSes. Maybe we’d have a good selection of cross platform apps that actually look nice and perform well.
- mjevans 2y ago
  Real damage of Microsoft's Monopoly power. They have a severe case of Not Invented Here syndrome and even for free Open Source Software refuse to ship any of it naively unless they can fork it and pretend they wrote it (early TCP code based off BSD IIRC). It's horrendously tough to target for a cross-platform application when you have to bring the entire GUI toolkit along and adapt it individually to every target, even the 95% of the market gorilla that is whatever versions of Desktop Windows are the most recent 3.

DidYaWipe 2y ago

But the example functionality is backspacing, which of course in no way requires a GUI. You could just as easily cite AtariWriter or Bank Street Writer, which came out before WordPerfect.

blihp 2y ago

It was implied by the phrase 'transformed the ways everyone used computers'. True, to younger computer users MacWrite would be the most familiar of the three. However, in terms of total unit sales and percentage of users for their day, MacWrite was practically rounding error in the word processor market. It was WordStar and then WordPerfect that dominated (and therefore 'transformed...') until the early/mid-90's when MS Word took over.

turnsout 2y ago
The point stands—we don't use the descendants of TUI word processors today. We essentially all use GUIs.

ja27 2y ago

WordPerfect for classic MacOS came out in 1988. It always felt like they bought someone else's product but apparently it was an in-house port.