Literacy and technology

[kandrathe]

Angel,Oct 28 2004, 03:32 AM]...

We had a "work shop"-session in school yesterday where I presented some aspects of my essay, and my teacher informed me that, for this particular section, I needed to demonstrate what "online" meant in 1989.

Do you know of any dictionaries that backtrack in time for outdated definitions? I'm googling like a madman, but have not been able to come up with anything yet.
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I'm sure you know most of this, but I will summarize what that period meant for me, and perhaps you can glean something to dig into. Online processing originally meant being at a CRT, rather than offline or batch processing. So, for me as a programmer working and editing software code online was preferable to sitting at a card punch machine and then submitting a card deck to the job scheduler (a person) who would run my "job" and then put the resulting printout in my output bin. As timesharing networks became more ubitquitous and more people (mostly at large companies or at universities) got on-line, the networks started connecting, first as ARPANET, and later extending that technology as USENET.


Most documents were written using Word Processing machines, and by the late 80's some PC software was emerging that was passable such as;

Wikipedia - WordPerfect
Wikipedia - WordStar
Wikipedia - Word (processing)

PC based word processing was still painful and antiquated compared to specialized mini computers (e.g. Xerox, WANG or Olivetti). Screen sizes and resolution were also small, and special characters and even upper and lower case were sometimes difficultly implemented. Getting lost online has a few meanings to me; first in that you have a very small window, and many formatting commands in your document so you really have very little idea how it looks printed, and then contextually it was hard then to view many parts of your document in any thematic view which tended to make continuity and clarity of purpose more difficult. That is, without printing it, marking up the paper and using the online text editor for corrections only.

And I googled this piece up that seems interesting.
Words, Words, Words: Creating, Editing, And Publishing - Opinions by Amy D. Wohl