Founders at Work.pdf

80 Founders at Work
word processing at DEC in the mid-’70s, there weren’t many screen-based word
processors. A lot of them were page-based, which meant that you edited one
page at a time, and if something was more than a page, you had to cut it and
paste it onto the beginning of another page, because they were thinking like
paper. In fact, some of them had things like platens to turn to make the paper
go up and down, and you set the margins with something you slid back and
forth. That was the Lexitron. But some of them, like NBI’s (Nothing But
Initials) system, were document-oriented.
This was before Wang did their first screen-based word processor. I came
out of the Multics project, which used the Runoff system, which Jerry Saltzer
had developed for the CTSS (the Compatible Time Sharing System), which was
one of the first time-sharing systems. To write his thesis, Professor Saltzer
invented this thing called Runoff, which was used basically to do the word processing
for it. It was a document-oriented word processor, as opposed to the
page-oriented ones. The big word processors were the Mag Tape and then
the Mag Card Selectric, from IBM. Those were relatively early in word processing.
There were a few things before that, none of them screen-based.
The idea of a long document that’s automatically broken up and that
embeds commands was like typesetting. So put those two together and we had
to invent the ruler—the embedded ruler. Now, others invented it simultaneously,
but we had to invent our idea of the embedded ruler that, when you put
the cursor above it, it does one thing, and below it, another. In the word processors
of the day, the ruler was active as you were typing and applied to what you
were typing, but it wasn’t really remembered in it. So we had to figure this out.
We were selling it to places where secretaries would use it. People were
paid by the keystroke in typesetting, in some cases. And in word processing,
they were paid by the hour, which is basically by the keystroke. So we were very
much into keystroke minimization. How many keystrokes does it take to do
things? Hours of arguments and design about that in the typesetting world and
the word processing world. I applied that to the spreadsheet. My whole mindset
was, “How do I make it easy to learn to use? How do I make it minimum
keystrokes for everything? How do I make it natural, so, if you’re doing this
repeatedly, it’s the natural thing to do?”
Day one I wasn’t thinking computer-like. The whole idea was not to think
computer-like. We used decimal arithmetic so it would act just like a calculator.
We didn’t use binary arithmetic, which might end up with some anomalies that
you might not understand.
I had Professor Jackson at the business school, and I had her look at the
prototypes as we were doing it (she consulted to CEOs of big companies). She
said, “You’re competing against the back of the envelope. It’s got to be really
easy to use.” I was constantly worrying about those things, and that affected the
design quite a bit, because I had a lot of experience in that user interface world.
I had also trained people on my product, so I had a lot of experience training
people. So I knew what it was like, what people learn to use, etc.
The challenge was, how do you express the value you’re typing in, the formula
you want to calculate, its location, and the precision of the decimal points,