I got my first word processor around 1981 — not a computer…a word processor. It was a Lexowriter and it did not play games or balance my checkbook or go online or even handle graphics. It just processed words and it did that very well for about three years. I followed this with my first computer, a Toshiba with a built-in monochrome (greenish) screen and no hard disk. It had two drives for 5¼" floppy disks. One disk always had to be the DOS-based word-processing software, a program called Spellbinder. You saved your work to the other floppy, then swapped things around and backed up that floppy to another floppy. If you were prudent or paranoid — with computers of that era, you were right to be both — you then backed-up your backup to yet another floppy.
Why did I use Spellbinder? It came with the computer…and I'll say this for it: It served me well, though for the longest time, its makers issued no upgrades and no improvements. I found out later that Spellbinder had been written by one man and he'd been killed in a car crash, casting his company into a kind of DOS-based limbo for a few years there. Those of us who used it had to sit and watch the industry evolve without us. When I moved to a faster computer, Spellbinder got slower, like I was trying to drive a horse-and-buggy on the freeway.
Other programs were emerging and every one of them did oodles of things Spellbinder would not do…and another problem was that I seemed to be the only human being on the planet using it. Friends would give me discs containing things they wrote in Wordstar, Word Perfect or Microsoft Word and I couldn't open their files, nor could I convert my Spellbinder files to anything they could open on their computers. When my pal Steve Gerber and I collaborated on a script, we might as well have been writing in different languages.
Finally, Spellbinder announced a major upgrade that would morph it from plain old word processing software to full-fledged desktop publisher. I sent the money and eagerly awaited its arrival only to experience a massive disappointment. The new, improved Spellbinder was a disaster — slow, clunky, complicated and likely to crash if you wrote a word containing more than three syllables. In fact, the program not only crashed, it took the Spellbinder company with it.
Orphaned, I migrated to Wordstar 3.0. Why? Well, for one thing, it was the Number One word processing software at that time. Having felt like an alien presence in the growing world of personal computers, I yearned for maximum compatibility. Foolishly, I thought, "Well, Wordstar's never going away on me." Also: For twenty bucks, you could buy a program that would convert all your Spellbinder files to Wordstar. Wordstar 3.0 was soon followed by Wordstar 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 and 7.0. Each had more features and each was less useful to me.
At one point in there, the Wordstar people came up with something called Wordstar 2000 which a lot of us bought, foolishly thinking it had something to do with Wordstar. It was a completely different program that served no purpose except to make the last version of Spellbinder look workable by comparison. If you wanted to write the word "cat" in Wordstar 2000, you had to type the "c," save the file, reboot, reload the program and then type the "a."
Okay, so it wasn't quite that bad. But it felt quite that bad.
There was also along the way, a program I thought was a great idea. It was called Wordstar Easy and it was basically Wordstar for Absolute Friggin' Idiots. An otter could have written a Harlequin romance novel on Wordstar Easy…and many probably did. It was Wordstar stripped-down to its raw skeleton — no fancy fonts, no fancy formatting, no inserting pictures. For the sheer act of writing prose, nothing I've worked on has been as fast and simple. I'd mastered the current version of Real Wordstar and it was actually fine…but I'd write in Wordstar Easy and then if I needed to format something for a fancy printout, I'd load it into the full program and make it pretty-pretty.
A great idea…but since no one else seemed to think so, its failure added to Wordstar's decline. Then came Wordstar for Windows, which wasn't even a fair fight. The Wordstar people had to compete with Mr. Gates' Word on Mr. Gates' operating system. The ref stepped in, stopped the fight and that's when we all knew it was time to abandon ship.
Battered and bloody, I fled in desperation to where I should have gone years earlier — to Microsoft Word. What had kept me from it, I suspect, was that when Gerber had me test-drive the current version on his computer, it seemed awfully mouse-oriented. The muscle skills involved in writing had not yet fully evolved for me from my typewriter days. Barring the growth of a third hand (somewhat unlikely), I didn't think I could work with a mouse…and Word then didn't seem too efficient without the active involvement of one of them little plastic rodents.
Still, I felt I had to learn it even if it took forever. Forever, in this case, turned out to be about a day and a half. Also, by then Microsoft Word was a better program and we PC users were all now living in a world of Windows. I've been generally happy with Word, though I liked Word 2000, which I used until last year, better than the version I'm currently using, which is Word 2007. The main advantage though is that I no longer have to worry about being incompatible with anyone else. Almost everyone I work with can open and use a file in Microsoft Word, and for the few who can't, I merely need to export my file in Rich Text Format or import their RTF files. I can even swap with someone who works on one of those MAC things you hear so much about.
I feel oddly, and I'm sure foolishly, secure with what I have now. Intellectually, I know that twenty years from now, I'll be writing this same piece recalling the primitive, long-defunct software of 2010 and I'll be struggling to convert my current word processing files to whatever the format is then. (I still have stuff in Wordstar 4.0 I need to translate to Word.) But for now, it feels like settled law and I'm relatively in sync with everyone else in my little corner of the technological universe. This really is what it's about. The fact that I can write scripts with all this software and make a living is of secondary importance…if that much.