At university, I typed on an IBM Selectric. It weighed a ton. Beautiful
print, proportional spacing, but no correction feature. And you had to
remember how many units of space each letter was worth if you whited out
and retyped: a capital W was four, a lowercase I was one, and most of
the rest were two or three.

I got a job at AES, writing user manuals, right after translation
school. Meanwhile, I was building up a freelance clientele and
translated on the word processors at work at lunchtime or after hours.
When I quit to go freelance, I bought a Sanyo computer with WordStar,
128 K RAM and two 128 K floppies, one for the software, one for my
files. I eventually got WordPerfect on my second computer. A great program.

One feature that AES had (and so did the Olivetti PC/word processor)
that Word still doesn't is multiple-string search and replace. You just
typed up a list of search strings in one column, the replacements in the
other, executed, and presto! I loved that feature.

On the other hand, most of the rest of the AES interface was very
clunky. You had to type all attribute codes. For instance, bold was
ctrl-X B for on, and same again for off (I think; it's been a few
decades now). You saw the codes on the screen, but they didn't take up
room on the printout unless you underscored them. And footnotes could be
customized to a fare-thee-well, but once you'd put in all the codes,
you'd have to let the program run for about an hour to produce the final
text. Same with columns, not to mention columns with footnotes. And if
there was a mistake, which there often was, you had to start over. The
other thing about AES was they decided on a page view instead of
document view. So you could only recall one page at a time to the
screen. Very slow compared to what we're used to now.

Those were the days.

K

On 21/12/2009 7:03 AM, Michelle Asselin wrote:
>
>
> Nobody worked with AES? Dedicated wordprocessors with 8 1/4 in
> floppies (they really were floppy!)
>
> In my early days, translating part-time, I'd translate long-hand home
> in the evenings and retype my translations at the office the next day.
> First on a manual, then electric typewriter (I went through most
> brands I think). Then on various AES machines, on a Micom. Then on to
> PCs, when diskettes still cost around $3 each!
>
> I also remember explaining clients (that was 1995) how to attach files
> to emails. There was also transmission of texts by modem (remember,
> Xmodem, Ymodem and other procols). Ah, the fun old times!
>
>

--
Karin Montin