I frankly was more excited about email, and the same group at Xerox (Advanced Systems Division) had an email system called Laurel that was better in some ways than anything available to the general public even today. It was pure coincidence that I happened to find a job working on word processing. I asked Charles about it and he smiled mysteriously. The test contained an intentional error: one of the instructions said go to step three when it was clear to me that what was meant was go to step 4. Charles Simonyi gave me a programming test, which I found fascinating. When I saw an ad for programmers wanted at Xerox, I had no idea Xerox was even in the computer business, but I applied. I basically knocked on doors at Apple, Atari, and a few other places. I was totally naive about the process of getting a good job. It made such a difference in the creative process to be able to edit my words easily that I knew word-processing was a very, very important innovation.Īfter two years at Harvard my roommate and I decided to take a year off and get jobs in Silicon Valley. But in high school I did my writing assignments longhand in college I wrote my first paper on that manual typewriter, but then used the rudimentary text-editing and word-processing software Harvard had available in the basement of the science center (vi and nroff) to do my economics term paper. I think she underestimated the rate of technological progress. My mother made me learn to type on a manual typewriter because she was afraid if I learned on an electric one I'd never be able to use a manual. By the end of high school I had written a general-ledger system for the New England Red Cross and, in my spare time, an email system. At 13 I volunteered at the Children's Museum in Boston, where I wrote an "Eliza"-like program to talk to the museum guests on a teletype connected to a PDP-1 computer at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, which donated the computer time. I programmed it to simulate traffic lights. My parents bought me a plastic computer called "Digi-Comp I." It had three bits of data memory and maybe room for eight logic gates. ![]() I fell in love with both writing and coding young. Hitting ALT-TW tells me the draft version of the document contains 2,752 words, 12,538 characters (no spaces).Ĭould you tell me a little about how you came to code word processing software, your time at Xerox in the 1970s and before that? The following is a lightly edited version of our exchanges, created of course with keyboard editing, mouse highlighting, cut-and-paste, word count, AutoCorrect and the bold icon. Within an hour, Brodie had agreed to be interviewed by email and a few hours later we were swapping questions and answers. ![]() Word is the software hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of us have used to write everything from notes to the milkman and shopping lists to Dear John letters, lists of our hopes and dreams, plans for world-changing events and great novels.īut who wrote Word itself? After Googling that question and discovering the public domain answer to be Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie I contacted the latter by email and asked him if he would share the story of how he came to help create the software that has become a fixture of modern life. And I got all this without having to buy a Mac (although I did have to upgrade my Victor 12MHz 286 to an AST 386SX with 1MB RAM and 20MB hard drive just to run Windows). With Word for Windows I had a true sense of what a document would look like, the screen was bright and elegant, features were – for once the adjective is spot on – intuitive. Word for Windows was certainly a very different and welcome experience after becoming accustomed to the arcane commands of WordStar, a program I used so often that I once absentmindedly answered the phone saying ‘Ctrl-KD’. I have drafted perhaps tens of thousands of articles and certainly over a million words using versions of this program, going all the way back to version 1.0 running on Windows 3.0, circa 1991, although there were versions of Word for other platforms going all the way back to 1983. I am writing this article on the latest release of Microsoft Word for Windows.
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