Word processor

“ You’re not dim-witted if WordStar doesn’t come as easily to you as to me. Oddly, I found Select—ballyhooed as a beginner’s word processor—to be more of a puzzle. Oh, well. One person’s dream software may be another’s kludge.
Keep in mind, however, that you must often suffer trade-offs between easiness, speed, power, and versatility. Although WordStar might not give you instant gratification, its speed and power may justify the struggle. Ditto for some of the best spreadsheets and other software categories. The big question is, How much word processing or spreadsheeting, or whatever, do you do? ”

“ Be cautious with recent, powerful word-processors that "auto-correct" text, or use "smart quotes" or any other such automatic retyping or formatting feature, since they can Do Bad Things to your e-text without your consent! When using any such package, it is best to switch off any feature that makes changes without asking you.
Two utilities which may come in useful are a spell-checker and a version difference checker. These may be built into your word processor, or you may have them as separate packages.
A spell-checker is like a chain-saw: a powerful tool, but one to be used very carefully. ”

“ You actually need only two things: the e-text itself and a text editor or word-processor that can handle book-sized files and save them as text.
Nearly all word processors and text editors in current use will work. Volunteers use many common programs, including WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, WordPad, DOS EDIT, vi, Brief, Crisp, EditPad, MetaPad, emacs, AbiWord, and the word processors from Open Office abd AppleWorks. And all of these are in actual use by volunteers today. Since all of them contain the necessary basic functions, the best program is the one you're most comfortable with. ”

“ Altogether, I’d say that WordStar, evaluated as a disk-based, fully featured word processor, is fast. And new wrinkles like hard disks will make it run still faster, even without the speed improvements that very likely will come. ”

“ Then, you select the text, copy it, and paste it into any word processor to process it. I use Microsoft Word. After pasting all of the text into it, I select all of the text, choose Courier New font, 10 point size, and set the margins at 5.5 inches. With this setup, when the text is saved as "Text with layout," the resultant text is 65 characters per line, every line. Setting hard returns is automatic. ”

“ WordStar will slow you down when your computer has to reach instructions that the program hasn’t already sent on to the RAM—the temporary memory. That means a time-consuming electronic trip to your floppy disk. Also, if you type in a certain amount of material, WordStar will automatically lock some of it on a disk if the RAM is running out of room. WordStar is a disk-based rather than a RAM-based word processor. ”

“ Mac users have the free spelling checker Excalibur, available from .
Gutcheck was used for format checking, and a few people had written some checking procedures of their own.
4. Working with HTML
In the survey, most volunteers preferred to handcraft their HTML using their normal editor. Those using a word processor edited the HTML as text, rather than composing a word processor file and then Saving As HTML. There was remarkable unanimity on this. ”

“ When you prefer an extra-large, extra-sharp screen and giant memory and when you can’t easily find micros of comparable quality. Here, too, I’m skeptical. The gap between micro hardware and the dedicateds is narrowing.
5. When you’re looking for a machine that will run special software that the micros won’t. Fondly, a Hollywood writer-director tells of a script-formating program “dreamed up by some lunatic in northern California.” Nowadays, however, moremore programmers are writing for micros than for dedicated word processors. ”

“ The etext is readily convertible by the reader at no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent form by the program that displays the etext (as is the case, for instance, with most word processors) ”

“ By key words of the language are meant those symbols and strings which have special meaning in the syntax of programs. They introduce special syntactic forms such as are used for control structures and declarations, or they are used as infix operators, or as some form of parenthesis. Key words will be few in number because each new key word introduces another case in the parsing rules and thereby adds to complexity in understanding the language, and because large numbers of key words inconvenience and complicate the programmer's task of choosing informative identifiers. ”

“ Computer technology has traditionally been the sole domain of a 'techie' elite, fluent in both complex programming languages and in English — the universal language of science and technology. Computers were never designed to handle writing systems that couldn't be translated into ASCII. There wasn't much room for anything other than the 26 letters of the English alphabet in a coding system that originally couldn't even recognize acute accents and umlauts — not to mention non-alphabetic systems like Chinese. But tradition has been turned upside down. Technology has been popularized. ”

“ Programs are conceived to enable the understanding of language. Everything ever written is scanned and stored for character recognition. Images are translated into short descriptions. A semantic component is attached to everything people compute. Hopes are high for using such means on a routine basis, though the compass might be set on some elusive direction. Even when machines will understand what we ask them to do-that is, when they integrate speech and handwriting recognition functions in the operating system-we will still have to articulate our goals. ”

“ When the object machine does have an operating system or executive program, the hardware/operating system combination will be interpreted as defining an abstract machine which acts as the object machine for the translator.
A language definition cannot dictate the architecture of existing object machines, whether defined entirely in hardware or in a hardware/software combination. It can provide a source language representation of all the needed capabilities and attempt to choose these so they have an obvious and efficient translation in the object machines. ”

“ The fact that the digital computer is just such a rigorously logical and unbending machine poses problems for it in certain of its dealings with its human masters. Language ideally should be logical in its structure. In general it probably is, but man is so perverse that he has warped and twisted his communications to the point that a computer sticking strictly to book logic will hit snags almost as soon as it starts to translate human talk into other human talk, or into a logical machine command or answer. ”

“ An assembler or compiler prepares a machine language tape suitable for direct interpretation by the computer from a program tape in operator language. Generally speaking, one statement accepted by FRAP produces one instruction for the machine. A single statement written for the PDP-3 compiler, DECAL-3, may cause several instructions to be written. ”

“ You may however, if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form, including any form resulting from conversion by word pro- cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as *EITHER*:
[*] The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and does *not* contain characters other than those intended by the author of the work, although tilde (~) , asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may be used to convey punctuation intended by the author, and additional characters may be used to indicate hypertext links ”

“ It translates our alphabet into its own alphabet, and then, after processing, it translates it back into ours. Displayed in those stored images which, if in lead, would constitute the contents of the lower and upper cases of the drawers in each typography shop, this literacy is subject to automation.
When we write, we visualize, making our language visible on paper. When we draw, we make our plans for new artifacts visible. The mediation introduced by the computer use does not affect the condition of language as long as the computer is only the pen, keyboard, or typewriter. ”

“ Modern, high-speed computers, such as the 1401, are marvelous electronic instruments, but they represent only portions of data processing systems. Well-tested programming languages for communication with computers must accompany the systems. It is through these languages that the computer itself is used to perform many of the tedious functions that the programmer would otherwise have to perform. A few minutes of computer time in translating the program can be equal to many, many hours of staff time in writing instructions coded in the language of the computer. ”

“ As with the descriptions of digital computer hardware, the semantics and syntax of each feature must be defined precisely and unambiguously. The action of any legal program will be determinable from the program and the language description alone. Any computation which can be described in the language will ultimately draw only on capabilities which are built into the language. No characteristics of the source language will be dependent on the idiosyncrasies of its translators. ”

“ Perhaps the best-studied case of invention is that of the learner in typewriting, who, after laboriously perfecting his "letter habits" or responses to single letters by appropriate finger movements on the keyboard, may suddenly find himself writing in a new way, the word no longer being spelled out, but being written as a unit by a coördinated series of finger movements. The amazing thing is that, without trying for anything of the kind, he has been able to break away from his habit of spelling out the word, and shift suddenly to a new manner of writing. ”

“ At this time there is little work in progress on the necessity or appropriateness of specialized hardware for natural language processing. Accepting the close relationship between human-grade natural language proficiency and general intelligence level, and the improbability of near-term attainment of humangrade general intelligence in machines, it is appropriate to focus instead on achieving usable natural language interfaces at a lower level of machine performance. ”

“ The language is relatively machine independent, representing possible logical constructs rather than specific hardware function, and is translated by a compiler into machine code to be run on a target machine. ”

“ If a machine can read, why can’t it understand verbal input 56as well? Lazy computer engineers have pushed this idea, and the simplest input system of all is well on the way to success. Computers today can recognize numbers and a few words, and the Japanese have a typewriter that prints out the words spoken to it! These linguistic advances that electronic computers are making are great for everyone, except perhaps the glamorized programmer, a new breed of mathematical logician whose services have been demanded in the last few years. ”

“ We can begin to investigate the question of computer intelligence by again looking up a definition. The word “compute” means literally to think, or reckon, with. Early computers such as counting sticks, the abacus, and the adding machine are obviously something man thinks with. Even though we may know the multiplication tables, we find it easier and safer to use a mechanical device to remember and even to perform operations for us. ”

“ If we do not interact with the computer via a primary programming language (Assembler or machine language) , I believe that it is impossible to find the principle of work of the computer either from in- or outside of it. ”

“ With the advent of digital technology, a language of two letters-zero and one-and the grammar of Boolean logic, we have stepped into a new age of language, no longer the exclusive domain of the human being. Such a language introduces new levels of mediation, which allow for the use of machines by means of sentences, i.e., sequences of encoded commands triggered by a text written in a language other than natural language. ”

“ The source language will provide encapsulated access to machine dependent hardware facilities, including machine language code insertions.
It is difficult to be enthusiastic about machine language insertions. They defeat the purpose of machine independence, constrain the implementation techniques, complicate the diagnostics, impair the safety of type checking, and detract from the reliability, readability, and modifiability of programs. ”

“ Many older processor architectures suffer from a serious shortage of general-purpose registers. This is especially a problem for compiler-writers, because their generated code needs places to store temporaries for things like intermediate values in expression evaluation. ”

“ The computer chip itself is a conceptual accomplishment beyond anything we can conceive of. The depth encountered in the functioning of the digital computer-from the whole it represents to its smallest components endowed with functions integrated in its operation-is of a scale to which we have no intuitive or direct access. Computers are not a better abacus. Some computer users have even noticed that they are not even a better cash register. They define an age of semiotic focus, in that symbol manipulation follows language processing. ”