🚀 go-pugleaf

On Friday, March 16, 2018 at 4:27:45 PM UTC-4, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:

> I was writing a blog article about early word processors and spreadsheets
> <https://news-commentaries.blogspot.com/2018/03/history-of-wordprocessors-and-spread.html>
> but only covered early 8-Bit micros. Assuming Electric Pencil was the
> first while WordStar or SuperCalc (spreadsheet) only really became famous
> in the early days of the late 70s to early 80s.

Word processing dates back to at least the 1940s, when catalogs 
and directories were stored on punched cards and sorted and 
printed out on tabulator machines.  

In the 1950s, Friden came out with the Flexowriter, a nice typewriter
that stored documents on paper tape.  In the 1960s, Friden added
electronics to this so that it could do more functions, including
calculations.  It could also serve as a terminal.



> I know that in offices before that era type writers were used, even if an
> IBM Selectric could ease the work. But they were hardware. They hadn't a
> display (monitor) to edit text and only when done print it out.

To clarify, a basic IBM Selectric was just a typewriter.  It was
nicer than many other brands, but still just a typewriter.

 
> Still I wonder if big machines like some IBM 360/370 did not have word
> processors... By word processor I do not mean any text editor. A word
> processor should at least be able to wrap a word into the next line if it
> didn't fit into the current line. And had some markup for defining a bold
> or italic character and sub- and superscript.

As mentioned by others, some IBM manuals were maintained on the
mainframe and printed by the 1403 printer.

I think almost every programmer prepared some documentation on
punched cards and printed it out.

The ROSCOE text editor had some formatting functions.  Before PC's
were widely distributed, I used it for documentation and it was
very useful.  Our Xerox mainframe printer handled upper and
lower case and a bit of formatting (e.g. boldface and several
portrait fonts).  I wrote a simple COBOL program to do some
additional formatting.  This worked out very well, especially
for documents of systems under development which changed very
often.



 
> Apparently the IBM MT/ST (Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter) from 1964
> would match that description which was used only with an IBM
> Selectric. But there should had been applications which would not depend
> on an external type writer rather than using a dedicated printer, no?

Not sure of your question.  The IBM MT/ST and MC/ST was integrated
with a Selectric typewriter which provided the keyboard and 'printer'.
As others mentioned, they were word processors.

IBM also had the Displaywriter word processing system.  1983 ad:
https://books.google.com/books?id=qgJ-2YapQ_oC&lpg=PA1065&dq=aba%20displaywriter&pg=PA1065#v=onepage&q&f=false

In addition, numerous companies had their alone standalone 
word processors:  Vydec 1976
https://books.google.com/books?id=ofVUb1zr41YC&lpg=PA289&dq=aba%20vydec&pg=PA289#v=onepage&q&f=false