What were some good non-G.U.I. environment word processor software packages?

[punchy71]

Hello,

What were some good word processor software packages that did not work under a graphical user interface environment from back in the earlier micro computing days in the U.S.?

Thanks

 

[Stone]

I like (and still use) Professional Write. It's from 1986.

 

[Chuck(G)]

WordStar, WordPerfect, Spellbinder, PFS:Write, PCWrite, Palantir, Electric Pencil...you name it. Even Microsoft Word, when it first came out, was text-mode.

Graphics were expensive, computationally speaking back then. Finding enough computational power to maintain a WYSIWYG display with a fast touch typist could be challenging.

 

[Agent Orange]

IMHO Word Perfect 5.1 reigned supreme in the late 80's (and still does). The 'reveal codes' function set it apart from most other WP's of the day. Word Perfect had their own magazine and an army of technical advisers that would go on-site to train the admin types if desired. Word Star also had a dedicated following. MultiMate was a nice compact WP that could be run off a single floppy. Even Radio Shack had 'Scripsit' which was made available for the Model II. I have a version of Scripsit' that runs on my Model 100. The list goes on and on.

 

[SomeGuy]

Actually, Microsoft Word 1.00 for DOS was kind of funny, it could use mono CGA graphics mode, and make use of that new-fangled Microsoft Mouse. But it also worked in text mode for compatiblity with IBM MDA and color CGA. But aside from seeing bold and italics on the screen, it worked the same as in text mode.

The most friendly was probably Professional Write, most popular from the late 80s and early 90s was WordPerfect, most popular and cross-platform for the early 80s was WordStar. Popular shareware product was PCWrite.

Some other text-based word processors include VisiWord, Leading Edge Word Processing, XyWrite, Norton Textra Writer, Framework, IBM Writing Assistant (is actually PFS:Write), MultiMate, IBM DisplayWrite, Microsoft Works for DOS, Ability (used graphics mode), Bank Street Writer (there was an IBM version too), Perfect Writer, NewWord, PeachText 5000, VolksWriter, Lotus Symphony for DOS.... And those are just on the IBM PC platform.

Everybody had their own word processor!

If you go back earlier, there were many dedicated word processing workstations that ran only (or mostly) the vendors word processing software.

 

[geoffm3]

I liked SuperScriptsit, Wordpro 3+, and Scribble! (on the Amiga), but it had this '.' syntax that seemed lifted straight from TI Writer on the 99/4A, which I also used a good bit.

Most of what I used them for was for letters, so I can't give you any direction on more advanced things besides mail merge.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Let's also be clear that word processing software did not originate on personal computers. In the beginning, firms built dedicated systems to that. Even GUI word processing preceded that of PCs by quite a stretch (google: Xerox Alto). IBM had the DisplayWriter and DEC had the DECstation/WPS for such stuff. The list of wod-processing machine manufactures is very long--and much forgetten. Artec, AES, Lanier, Harris, Qyx, CPT,...

 

[KC9UDX]

And for a long time, a consumer Word Processor was a really fancy electric typewriter.

 

[Trixter]

Actually, Microsoft Word 1.00 for DOS was kind of funny

While the WYSIWYG editing mode was one of the reasons I loved the product, I learned only recently that Word was created using the Charles Simonyi idea of creating a generic virtual machine, then writing the application for that VM. The obvious goal was so that the same application could be ported to other architectures more easily by just porting the VM (something Java is most well-known for today) but I'm not sure Word for DOS actually got ported anywhere. I assumed that would have resulted in a massive performance hit, but even on 4.77MHz hardware it feels snappy, even doing some heavier lifting like repaginating with word-wrap around an irregularly-shaped object, or doing a global search-and-replace.

Word was a very serviceable word processor. I remember Word's intuitive selection (hold down shift to stretch the cursor, same as all GUIs today), background repagination, pseudo-WYSIWYG, the ability to show or hide as much of the ruler/border/junk to control the amount of screen area available for text, and the speedy Lotus-style menus as being very impressive in the mid-1980s. There were other WPs that were faster (WordPerfect, XyWrite, Wordstar), and others that had more features, but I always felt Word struck a nice balance. Mock Microsoft, but they definitely did office tools well (and still do).

(Why were Lotus-style menus great for a word processor? Because when you pulled up the menu, it only took up 3 lines of screen realestate, only 12% of the screen, leaving the other 88% perfectly readable. Pull-down menus would cover up more lines of text, as the pull-downs used 8 or more lines to show the options in the menu.)

 

[krebizfan]

Typesetting machines started getting rudimentary word processors in the 70s. As word processors got more capable, ideas from the typesetting world were introduced (or reinvented). It is somewhat amazing that concepts on how to change font/face/size currently in use are derived from 50 year old phototypesetters with no screen.

The OP would do well to go to Archive.ORG and look at some of the InfoWorld and PC Magazine comparative reviews of DOS word processors, especially in the late 80s when MS Word and WordPerfect were leap frogging each other as competitors kept pace, specialized for a select audience, or declined into irrelevance. Converters and interoperability mattered. Great times for the cheap upgrader because sometimes the new word processor version plus third party tools would cost less than just the third party tools separately.

 

[Agent Orange]

Nice Comparison chart:

Word processor	Apple	Atari	CP/M	CPT	Commodore 64	HP	IBM PC	Kaypro	Macintosh	Morrow	IBM PCjr	Rainbow 100	TI Professional	Tandy	ZX Spectrum
Tasword	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes
Homeword	II, IIc,IIe	800	No	No	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	No
MacWrite	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No
Pfs:Write	II, IIc,IIe	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	No
AtariWriter	No	800XL, 1200	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No
Omniwriter	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No
Word Juggler	II,IIe,III	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No
PC-Write	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	No
Wordvision	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No
Volkswriter deluxe	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	No	Yes	No	No
Perfect Writer	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No	No
Plu Perfect	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	2,4,10	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Wordstar	II,IIe	No	Yes	No	No	110,150	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	TRS-80	No
Newword	IIe	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Appleworks	II, IIe	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No
III E-Z Pieces	III	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No
Symphony	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No
Framework	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No
XY Write II+	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No	No	No
WordPerfect	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	Tandy 2000	No
Microsoft Word	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	Tandy 2000	No
CPT Word Processors	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	No

[h=2][/h]

 

[KC9UDX]

That's a pretty short list, too. I had several text-based word processors for the C64, and I don't recognise the names of the 3 on that list. Wordstar didn't even make the list.

 

[Agent Orange]

Wordstar didn't even make the list.

Yes it did - look again.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Memowrite? Displaywrite? WPS? There are probably at least 50 more formats hosted on PCs; very probably at least 100 more hosted on other platforms. For example, where's Interleaf?

 

[HoJoPo]

Wordperfect was available for the Apple IIe/IIc and IIgs: http://apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/Sel/WordPerfectPD.html

Could any Macintosh/Amiga/Atari ST version be considered non-GUI? Anyway, Wordperfect was available for them, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Versions_available

 

[punchy71]

Electric Pencil...you name it. .

I did a little bit of research on this "Electric Pencil" you mentioned. It turns out it was the first word processor written for a home computer. I thought that was pretty cool.

 

[punchy71]

What were some of the most significant innovations in some of these early word processor software programs?

 

[Corey986]

What about WordWizard!!!

http://www.sol20.org/manuals/img/wordwizard-img.pdf

 

[krebizfan]

What were some of the most significant innovations in some of these early word processor software programs?

You could do worse than to look at the following
http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/deisenbe/compartics/History_of_Word_Processing.pdf which gives an academic overview and only focuses on major releases
http://www.wordstar.org/index.php/wordstar-history which also points out features WordStar got after the competition

If you want specific timelines for which Word Processor was first to announce which feature, you would need to conduct a lot of research. Early comparative reviews were published in Compute and Byte; later on, PC Magazine and InfoWorld had annual comparison issues. PC Mag's 1986 comparison covered more than 50 different products. That should show what features were becoming important to purchasers. Many of these issues are online.

 

[vwestlife]

WordStar was king in the early to mid '80s. Its mnemonic Ctrl-key command structure was a brilliant system once you learned it. Fast typists loved it because it kept your fingers over the letter keys while performing commands, instead of having to move over to the F-keys or even the arrow keys (since it had an embedded "cursor diamond"). Many text editors, including MS-DOS EDIT, retained support for many of the WordStar Ctrl-keys well into the '90s.

And with the older versions, they were proud to point out that the WordStar user's manual was written using WordStar.

Unfortunately, the IBM PC version was just a badly ported copy of the 8-bit CP/M version. Then they released WordStar 2000, which was slow and changed the commands, and everyone hated it. Ultimately MicroPro ended up buying out a clone of WordStar (NewWord) and releasing that as WordStar 4, and finally people were happy -- but by that time WordPerfect was quickly gaining on it, and they never recovered their lead in the market share.