My first introduction to word processing was in early 1968. I was still at USF then, and decided
to look for a job by programming the school's IBM 1130 to generate my resume. There was the
little problem that the computer printers in those days printed in upper case letters only, so in
today's vernacular the resume looked like I was shouting. I sent off 50 copies, and got back 48
"What kind of a nerd are you?" responses. Of the two people who actually interviewed me, I got
back two more "What kind of a nerd are you?" statements after that.
Even though I have worked continuously in the computer realm (after I finally did find a job),
professional desktop publishing in my first decade consisted of using a goose quill to scratch
random thoughts down onto parchment, which would be typed up in draft mode by a secretary,
which I would then scribble changes on, which would be retyped, which (insert quasi infinite
loop here). Senior people of course used a Dictaphone, rather than a quill pen.
As an aside, probably the main effect of putting desktop computers in people's offices, is to
replace a $15K/year secretary with a $30K year executive, mostly doing what the secretary used
to do for Him.
Anyway, advance to the late '70's, and IBM was trying to market a minicomputer named the
8100. Somebody wrote a centralized word processing system for it. Since the thing was
horribly expensive, there were about 16 dumb (3270) CRTs connected to it, and one heavy duty
Selectric (eg golfball) typewriter for the printout from these 16 stations. You want fonts? The
system had a command to stop the printing at a font change, letting you change the golfball to a
new font ball. The really neat thing about it was that the people in the offices nearest to the
central printer got to know more about what was happening in the company than anybody else
did, because (we) hung around the printer room all day reading everybody else's memos,
especially the memos written by the Big Boss's secretary. (This lasted until I inadvertently
asked the Big Boss about something that I had forgotten I had read about in one of those
confidential memos.)
As an aside, nowadays the neat place to have an office is near the central fax machine (which I
do). Here it is 15 years later, and I am still maintaining my career by snooping on other people's
correspondence. If E-mail ever really takes off, I might as well retire.
Somewhere in this timeframe, things like Runoff and Tex appeared.
But now, we are in the 90's, and we all have big honking PCs on our desks, and when we send a
letter, we want to send it in Style, with Pizazz, lots of Fonts, heavy duty Graphics, and
sometimes even in Color. And, the PCs of today can certainly deal with anything like that you
want to do. There are desktop publishing systems out there that would make Time Magazine
seem like kiddy scrawl.
I assert that most of us can do all of this, with a lot less horsepower than a full fledged Desktop
Publishing system. Standard Word Processing systems (Stool Top systems) are very
sophisticated today, and can take care of just about anybody's word dreams. Desktop
Publishing systems are not intuitive. If you are going to really use them to the extent that you are
using the extra functionality beyond what a mainline word processing system offers, you will
have to put in a lot of time and energy. This is a real example of the law of diminishing returns.
The word processing systems available today have so much functionality, at a real ease of use,
that the few extra features found in a full desktop publishing system require a high cost and
serious effort for only incremental value.
As an aside, this is more than my own opinion. It is also the party line of the place where I work,
and I did not survive there 27 years by telling the Bosses they were low tech cheapskates. Too
often.
If you are trying to do a professional looking newsletter, with several articles on the front page,
which each run off onto their own areas of subsequent pages, something like Pagemaker would
make the job easy. But I have done such newsletters with WordPerfect (and some extra time).
There is a fine book by Daniel Will-Harris called "Desktop Publishing in Style" that shows how
to use WordPerfect (and the book I have is old enough to still reference the DOS version of
WordPerfect) for all manner of traditional desktop publishing functions. The book itself was
even written in WordPerfect.
Mr Harris states: "While desktop publishing is truly a revolution in the way printed
communications are created, it's jammed packed with hype. ... It's not whether you can do
something with a program, but whether you'd want to."
We contract with a wonderful technical writer for a lot of our documentation. He normally
insists on using Pagemaker, but I think that it is more for the Mac/Yuck-like look and feel, and
the "I'm more comfortable with this one" syndrome, than the functionality. When he works on
my documentation, we engage in a lot of yelling and screaming on these theological matters, but
in the end, he does my stuff in WordPerfect. People often complement me on his chapters of my
documentation, and wonder why the rest of the book looks so crummy.
Putting together a commercial magazine, with articles, ads, sidebars, and mastheads (eg
ComputorLink), or a professional advertising circular where the future of your business depends
on drawing people into your salon, does require professional tools. And more importantly,
professional people to do the job. The end result is more due to the face behind the fingers doing
the typing, that the program the fingers are typing into.
Unless you are one of the very few people who can truly call themselves "professional writers
and publishers", true Desktop Publishing systems are probably serious overkill. I think that
Stooltop Publishing systems are more than adequate for the bulk of us that simply need (or have
the urge) to write.
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