Electric Pencil家用电脑第一个字处理软件。作为第一个文字处理程序,Electric Pencil,开发者是美国人迈克尔·思瑞尔(Michael Shrayer)。Michael Shrayer完成了Electric Pencil的开发,这是早期流行的、用于微计算机的文字处理软件。
Michael Shrayer, an avid computer hobbyist from California, created the Shrayer's Electric Pencil program on his Altair (one of the first commercially available personal computers) to make it easier to write manuals for his programs. It took him a full year to complete and it allowed people to create, edit, store, retrieve and print documents digitally. In 1979, Micropro International produced the first commercially viable descendent of the Electric Pencil, WordStar.
Since Electric Pencil first debuted in 1976, more than 400 other word processing packages have emerged, most fading into oblivion. This article--first of two in this issue that together recount the history of microcomputer word processing software--focuses on three of the earliest word processing software packages, Electric Pencil, EasyWriter, and WordStar, which was the mid-1980s leader in the CP/M, PC-DOS, and MS-DOS operating system environments
Electric Pencil, released in 1976, was the first word processor for home computers.
It was developed by a programmer named Michael Shrayer who apparently wanted to document his own software on the same machines he was programming.
Versions were created for the Altair 8800, the Processor Technology Sol-20, the NorthStar Horizon, TRS-80, and IBM PC among other machines. It was ultimately eclipsed by Micropro International's WordStar.
Most releases of Electric Pencil worked only with video cards which offered 16 lines of 64 characters such as the Processor Technology VDM-1. Those video cards mapped their 1024 on-screen characters to 1024 bytes of memory at address 0CC00H. Electric Pencil directly manipulated this memory.
Electric Pencil was written in 8080 assembly language and could also run on Zilog Z-80 computers.
他表示,无论在什么时候,软件的易用性都与其他任何特定的文本处理功能同样重要,在某些情况下,甚至是更加的重要。而 Word 软件的易用性,将会和与 Excel 和其它办公应用程序之间的连贯性和兼容性一起,成为新的用户期望。个人生产性工具软件同样也需要在协作性和团队工作能力方面得到增强。在接受微软公司官方访问的时候,Pathe 表示:“ Word 中所采用的图形设计,已经成为了当今世界现代电脑应用程序软件当中最常见的图形设计。从很多方面来讲,我都认为 Word 帮助消费者们理清了自己的思想,准确地表述出了自己希望生产型工具软件究竟应当是怎样的。”
他说:“作为苹果 Mac 电脑的早期支持者,这在很大程度上帮助我们在开发团队当中建立起了足够的敏感性。而这一敏感性将继续贯彻于 Windows 版的 Word 软件的开发过程当中。”
当被问到在 Word 的整个成长历程当中,都有哪些里程碑式的事件和标志的时候,Pathe 为我们列举了工具条按钮、打印预览、后台拼写和语法检查功能、自动纠错与改正、通过画笔和橡皮擦来建立表格的功能,以及其它等等等等。