>One of my ideas, is to re-engineer the typewriter Most of your ideas about the typewriter, David, are what the first word-processors looked like.
My Army office, in 1982, had a Wang WP system that we thought was the cat's meow. As you say, it had a vertical CRT that displayed one complete page. I think it had a 10-megabyte hard drive. You typed in a page, or pages, but you couldn't back up or make corrections, and you had to add any formatting by typing in the tags (i.e., <bold><italic>this text</italic></bold>. To edit or correct, you hit the Edit key. That split the screen horizontally across the middle, and brought your text page(s) up from the bottom to the center line. If you were happy with the first line, you would scroll it up, and it went above the centerline. If the next line had a mistake, you typed that (entire) line again correctly; it appeared above the line, and you then hit Delete to remove the first line underneath. Then on to the next line, completely replacing any line that contained an error. Pretty lame by today's standards, but it sure beat using white-out. And a tremendous boon f or sending TWXs (telegraph wire express -- the equivalent of today's fax) which were digitized by being read by an OCR, and thus could not contain any errors or corrections in the magnetic ink used. And it cost several thousand dollars. Boy, do I feel like a geezer today! Alex --------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: texascavers-unsubscr...@texascavers.com For additional commands, e-mail: texascavers-h...@texascavers.com
