The Trouble with Gerrold: InYerFace
January 6, 2012 —
(Page 1 of 4)
Back in the earliest days of “micro-computing”—even before IBM and MS-DOS arrived on the scene—there were approximately 100,000 personal computers in the world. Those who were using their machines for business or writing were most likely using CP/M. And many Apple users installed add-on boards with a Z80 chip so they could run CP/M programs as well.
CP/M was a pretty rugged file handling system for its time. It worked around the limitations of floppy disks, and later on it adapted well to 10-megabyte hard drives. When IBM needed an operating system for its 16-bit PC, it considered licensing CP/M, but talks broke down and IBM went to Microsoft for MS-DOS. MS-DOS used a lot of the same concepts and mechanisms of CP/M, so the most popular programs of the day—WordStar, dBase II, Turbo Pascal—were easily ported over. The business-level “micro-computer” users quickly graduated from their 8-bit machines to the increased power of IBM-PCs or IBM-compatible PCs, and that was the end of CP/M.
In those days, an operating system wasn’t an operating system as much as it was a file-handling system. You could copy, delete and move files. You could get a directory listing. You could write batch files to run scripts. And you could run programs—one at a time. You would type the program name and perhaps a few parameters like /s or –r, and the program would run.
That was your interface. And a lot of software behaved the same way. Your monitor would display a continually scrolling list of commands and responses. Until you could peek and poke actual screen locations, you also had to write a command-line interpreter as the front end of your software. And because every monitor had its own specific codes for peeking and poking, that was a lot easier than providing configuration files for every piece of hardware on the market.
The best of the early command-line interpreters simulated spoken English, and for a while that seemed to be the direction that the computer interface was headed. A command-line interpreter would process whatever you typed in and produce an appropriate result. If what you typed was incomprehensible to the interpreter, the program would respond with a “Huh?” message, or a less polite “INPUT ERROR.”
One of the best command-line interpreters was built into the Colossal Cave Adventure game, and later on the Zork series of text adventures and the Infocom games that expanded on that. Again, you typed and the computer scrolled responses up the screen.
On the database side, dBase II could be run from the command line, or you could write complex scripts. When it became possible to write directly to specific screen locations, you could process data in forms that would update as you worked. This static interface began to shift how we thought about accessing our data. It was one of the first steps away from the command-line interpreter.
But the real powerhouse software of the moment was WordStar, one of the most sophisticated programs available for CP/M and later DOS. It set the standard for word-processing software for many years. The top third of the screen was a menu of commands, the bottom two-thirds were filled with the text you were working on. Once you had learned the commands so well that they were second nature, you could eliminate the menus and go to a full-screen mode.
Older users will remember the control-key diamond of S/E/D/X for moving the cursor. If you hit the top or the bottom of the screen, your text would scroll up or down. Other control keys gave you access to a whole repertoire of necessary functions. Ctrl-K-S would save a file. Ctrl-P-B would shift to boldface. Remember those? If you were a touch typist, once you had the muscle memory for WordStar’s command structure, you could hit 120 words per minute on the straightaway.
Many science fiction writers were quick to abandon typewriters for WordStar and other word processing programs. Most notable were Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. But some users didn’t like the control key menus of WordStar and preferred WordPerfect or Electric Pencil.
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