[Am-info] Word Processing Features

[Dan Strychalski]

Quoting part of our recent exchange and responding, Geoffrey
(esoteric@3times25.net) posted --

>>> I maintain that macros are not worth the effort of the software company.
>>> Why?  Because, unfortunately, macro users are a huge minority.  I'd bet
>>
>> This is the excuse given -- no, not given directly by those who did it,
>> but offered by their apologists -- for the elimination, beginning in
>> 1982 and lasting until 1992, of certain keystrokes from mass-market user
>> interfaces. Not to mention a million other failings of commercial
>> software of the past twenty years.
>
> Sure, because the assumption (incorrect as it might be) was that you
> didn't need special keystrokes, you've got a mouse now!

I wish I had a nickel for each time I've heard that.

Let's examine it.

As late as 1989 a PC Magazine columnist wrote that the keyboard was the
part of a computer system with which the user was the most "intimate."
Mice for IBM-type micros first appeared in 1982, and they took an
extremely long time to catch on. So at least throughout the eighties
era, software vendors could not assume that the user had a mouse.

And they didn't assume it. They paid extraordinary attention to the
keyboard.

Successful MS/PC DOS developers put the function keys and the
editing/paging and arrow clusters to work, and made the modifier keys
work with everything else -- with the one exception that Ctrl didn't
work, or had only undocumented functions, or produced non-ASCII
characters instead of commands, in conjunction with the letter keys.
I'll spare you the details, which I've posted here before. (If I had a
nickel....)

It seems appropriate to repeat that the one feature in association with
which any of those keystrokes was used as a command key in either Word
or WordPerfect was the macro function. Remember what has been said about
that feature in this thread.

In WordPerfect, not even Alt-A through Alt-Z did anything -- except for
a handful that called up vendor-supplied macros you'd be lucky to find
(and understand) descriptions of in the manual, and for which you you
could see neither names nor descriptions on the screen (well, you could
by a third-party add-on, or write a batch file and choose "DOS Command"
or temporarily "exit to DOS"...). A program in which you *type all day*,
for all intents and purposes completely lacking in typing-zone command
keystrokes, one of the greatest conveniences and easiest-to-learn
resources on a computer system.

(They're especially easy to learn if you have as-you-work on-screen
help. Name one highly successful native MS/PC DOS program that had THAT.
One of the first things that struck me about *nix was that such help
existed -- in Elm, Gopher, Lynx, Mutt, Pico, Pine, Cfdisk, Joe.... I
hadn't seen such help since my WordStar days.)

The designers of the Mac felt that people would want and benefit from
command keystrokes in or near the typing zone -- but they made the
modifier key for such keystrokes the vendor-specific Command key. Sure,
they gave the Mac a Ctrl key three years later. They also told
developers in no uncertain terms not to use it.

(It would not be inaccurate to say that the Mac, generally regarded as a
keyboard-hater's machine, was friendlier to keyboarders than any of the
top-ranking x86-based programs of the second half of the eighties.)

*Extraordinary* attention. 

LANs started to take off in the second half of the eighties. My employer
at the time, and my next employer, and the next, ran cc:Mail for
internal e-mail, and I don't recall hearing of any other app of that
kind that made it big in that period. cc:Mail toed the line: help in a
separate screen, non-ASCII, non-typing-zone keystrokes for all command
functions, only Microsoft-defined glyphs from ASCII command keystrokes.
The documentation mentioned a file containing keystroke definitions; I
tried creating such a file, and searched for it on my machine and the
LAN at all three places of work... no dice.

Windows. Ah, Windows. In versions 1.x through 3.0, its designers took
great care to make all functions available through... the function keys,
the editing/paging cluster, the arrow keys, Alt with the letter keys,
Alt and Ctrl with the function keys, Ctrl and Shift with the editing and
arrow clusters -- everything BUT Ctrl with the letter keys. Not until
1992, when the monopoly was well established, did keystrokes like the
Ctrl-Z/X/C/V Undo/Cut/Copy/Paste suite (originally implemented as
Command-Z/X/C/V on the Lisa nine years earlier) appear in Windows.

So. The only "special keystrokes" anyone decided no one needed were the
keystrokes Ctrl-A through Ctrl-Z. A study of eighties-era software
suggests that certain vendors -- those that were to enjoy the greatest
success -- decided this _en masse_ in 1982. And when Microsoft had the
market locked up, someone there suddenly decided that everyone DID need
those particular "special keystrokes."

Coincidence? Market demand? Commitment to providing the best possible
product? Any other rationalizations?

Dan Strychalski