My first word processor
This week I took a little trip down memory lane when a friend posted a meme or something about Stephen King’s Wang word processor in the 1980s.
That was early for me, but sometime in 1993 or 1994 I bought my first word processor. Not a general purpose computer with a word processor, but a Brother Word Processor. It was substantially less profit-generating for me than King’s Wang. Then again, it wasn’t a five-figure investment, either. Maybe $250, certainly no more than $300. At 23 or 24, though, that was a major investment. I’ve owned cars that cost less.Really it was a glorified typewriter with a monochrome CRT screen and the capability to save documents to a floppy disk.
It looked a bit like this Brother WP-3410 that was posted on Reddit’s r/retrobattlestations subreddit. I don’t think it looked quite like that – if memory serves, the floppy drive was on the side and not in the front of the keyboard.
It was quite rudimentary, but it beat the hell out of using a typewriter. We had a PC in the Student Government office at my college that I could use, but I was not familiar with WordPerfect and I needed something at home to write papers on anyway.
You could use it as a typewriter, too. I think I used it to “lay out” some columns for our so-called underground newspaper at ECC. I’d compose a column and then Tetris a bunch of different columns into shape, then glue everything up and take it to the copy shop to make copies. (This, for anybody who wonders, is where my nickname originated.)
I’d love to find a used model and write a blog post or two on it for old times’ sake. None of the models currently on eBay look quite right. This listing looks really close, but probably a year or two too old. Somehow I went from hunt-and-peck on the Brother keyboard to touch typing. This was good, because I had a bad habit of waiting until the last possible minute to actually write papers.
In the end, it was phased out in favor of the used PC my dad bought me as a graduation present when I got my 2-year degree from ECC. An Intel 486 66MHz with a generous 8MB of RAM and 212MB of storage and a CD-ROM drive, loaded with Windows 3.11 and MS-DOS 6.22 (and DOOM, of course). Not to mention an IBM keyboard that probably violated noise regulations.
Anyway, I’m glad I stumbled on the King post. I have fond memories of banging out papers on that machine. It served me really well.
My first word processor was some editor I had on an Apple ][e in the 1980’s. It turned out to be part of my first paying computer job because a senior high school English class required typed reports, but most students did not have the ability to do so. [If they did the spelling mistakes etc were so high that the students were getting F’s that way.]
So I started typing up the reports and letting Apple Writer (though it might have been WordStar) do the spell checking. I think I got paid $20.00 per report and $1.00 per page printed (mainly because I was using up ink on my dot matrix printer). I think I ended up with a hundred dollars by the end of the year. [Not a lot but still more than I had from anything else on a computer.] Doing so also helped teach me to go from hunt and peck to ‘sort of touch typing’ that I do still.
$100 was nothing to sneeze at in the 80s! That’s a pretty good hustle.
My first word processor was vi on the Honeywell 66 system at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. It was at the center of the statewide network serviced by that GCOS based computer as the UACN.