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SeanLuke | 1 year ago
Um, hello, Wang OIS? WordStar and WordPerfect didn't invent anything. They were copies of terminal-based word processors.
But MacWrite was different in two important ways. First, like Bravo and Gypsy before it, it was WYSIWYG, a million times better than WordStar/WordPerfect. And it worked with the LaserWriter. But more importantly: it was free. This made MacWrite revolutionary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories
snowfarthing|1 year ago
There's a certain power that comes when you can designate that something is a section header, or a title, or a paragraph, or an equation -- and that power is felt when you decide you want to change the style for all the titles and section headers, or change how you number and reference equations and theorems.
Word processors (to the best of my knowledge -- it's been years since I've used one) can't do this. This kind of power comes from markup languages, like LaTeX or HTML/CSS (if you organize your documents correctly).
Having said that, there are LaTeX editors that both provide a certain amount of "What You See Is What You Get" (I think one is called "LyX", and I think GUI Emacs provides this, too) but nonetheless allow you to use LaTeX directly when you need it; I guess this is equivalent to the "Show Codes" ability that WordPerfect provided. (I wouldn't know, though, because I prefer to use Vim to write my documents.)
Also, I would agree that when things become freely available, that can be a game-changer, but as someone who grew up with a terminal and a giant computer with 8-inch disks and an Atari 800XL, when a neighbor showed off his Macintosh, it would be out of the question for my family to think of that as "free".