I once asked acreinc@20 employees about ‘word processor.’ The usual response was either a blank stare or the dull smile of youth vilifying anything older than they are. Other responses associated the words with ‘word processing’, something similar but not quite the same.
IBM defined the term word processing as "the combination of people, procedures, and equipment which transforms ideas into printed communications." The term was used to refer to dictating machines and ordinary, manually-operated selectric typewriters.
Wikipedia refers to a word processor as an obsolete type of stand-alone office machine, popular in the 1970s and 80s, combining the keyboard text-entry and printing functions of an electric typewriter with a dedicated computer for the editing of text.
Sometime in 1986, when I was in my second contract as president of a multinational research company, our Chairman decided to invest in word processors which I recall was an Amstrad. It was expensive, something in the vicinity of US$5,000 each.
It combined the best features of an IBM selectric typewriter and the more obvious advantage of a computer even with limited memory. Using a high-quality single-use magnetic cassette tape and a cartridge with standard fonts, it created top-quality and uniform print on a bond paper. It was perfect for report-heavy research and consulting companies whose quality of output was sometimes judged by the quality of the printed documents.
Combined with a small program that allowed users to type to memory one record (single line of about 80 characters) and make corrections before commanding the printer ball to start rolling, the word processor became a welcome and safe transition from snowpake-dependent selectric typewriters. Its predecessor and the first word processing program, the Electric Pencil, was written by Altair programmer Michael Shrayer.
It was also a good reason not to fully migrate to desktop IBM computers that used the unattractive dot-matrix machines and WordStar to print documents. IBM computer or its clone was starting to gain popularity among research companies in other countries. Although the company was locally processing reports using data collected in 16 counties, the chairman decided it was not useful enough for the Philippine environment and probably too advanced for local workers.
WordStar, something that Acre employees considered old stuff or ‘jurassic’ when I mentioned it, was the first commercially successful word processing software program. It was developed and released in 1979 by Micropro International for microcomputers and worked wonderfully well with the IBM microcomputer (which later became known as the IBM desktop computers).
The word processing concept was designed to distribute secretarial work to other staff members and do away with the executive or private secretary or to allow one secretary to perform various administrative tasks for three or more executives. Invention.com reports that “The labor and cost savings of this device were immediate, and remarkable: pages of text no longer had to be retyped to correct simple errors, and projects could be worked on, stored, and then retrieved for use later on.”
Defined as the manipulation of computer generated text data including creating, editing, storing, retrieving and printing a document, word processing became the standard tool for staff and secretarial work. WordStar was the preferred software program to perform these tasks. Version 3.0 of WordStar for DOS was released in 1982. Within three years, WordStar was the most popular word processing software in the world.
When I learned to use WordStar, I found it functional but less than friendly and perfect. Yet the features presented a big leap from the typewriting and word processing era. Features like foldering, retrieving, editing, saving and on-line copy-paste writing made this software a real time-shaving tool. These days, it is hard to imagine the time spent by employees to manually cut a word, sentence or paragraph from a printed document and paste that on another page of the same document.
When I visited Michigan State University for a faculty exchange program, the standard word processing software used in the graduate school of business was no longer WordStar. WordPerfect knocked WordStar out of the word processing market after the poor performance of WordStar 2000. Seymour Reubenstein, the programmer who developed WordStar, confessed that he didn’t know much about business and relied merely on his programming skills. WordStar, however, remained the standard in the Philippines until foreign buyers and clients knocked some sense on local decision makers in the mid-1990s and Microsoft Word became the preferred word processing program.
When our chairman invited me to sign a third and longer contract, what came to mind were these two things -- word processor and WordStar -- and the feeling that the country was being pushed back into the dark ages as the rest of the world sky-rocketed into the era of new methods and technologies. What the country needed at that time to catch up or even stay close was an environment where decision makers allow new ideas and new technologies to prosper. That thought blossomed to become one of the seeds that created acreinc@20.
(This is the first chapter, part 1 of a series of articles on the history of acreinc@20. Part 1 talks about the pre-acreinc@20 days and attempts to answer the questions:What were the conditions that led to the development of this new enterprise? What were the challenges? What were the management and enterprise development principles that became the bases for the new enterprise? What were the resources needed to start it up and roll over for long-term viability? For comments, write to abfontanilla@yahoo.com or nick.fontanilla@gmail.com)
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