Part IV

Prologue

Part IV ended with me getting married in November of 1981 and being very happy.  With a new year I began a new chapter in my life with a wife and ten year old stepdaughter.

Word Processing 1982

Work at Harris Word Processing division was going well when in February the architectural team completed the design for the new word processing division which was now being called “HTEXT”. The five of us on the architecture team were then reassigned to lead individual teams for each of the areas that we designed.  The part of the system I designed did the formatting of text to be displayed such as handling word wrap at the end of the line, determining the end of a page, text justification (center, left, right) and so on, things we take for granted in this current age of computers but in ’82 we were designing the basic software that did such tasks.  

The new system was going to be “WYSIWYG”, (pronounced wiz-ee-wig) which stands for “What You See Is What You Get”.  This was the latest thing for word processing systems.  Up to this point word processing systems used a “markup” commands which you embedded in you like the following,

<SZ-12> <I> I'm in italic,<-I><SZ-18><B> Your'e in bold.<-B> <-SZ>

Which would produce:

I'm in italic, Your in bold.

Quote, Billish Ellish Song "Copycat", 2017

If you got had a missing “<”, “>” or “-“ the formatting of the text would be messed up from that point onwards. . Only upon careful examination would you discover what you did wrong.  

There were hundreds of commands, which made reading the text difficult to read while you were writing it, and one misplaced bracket and everything would get all messed up.   Such systems had a key or command that would hide the embedded markup commands and format the text as it would be printed, but you could not edit the text while in the “Display” mode. Thus the newer systems being developed were WYSIWYG  and it was a race to see which company came out with it first, Wang, Toshiba, Lanier were all working on such systems. 

With the design complete, I begin leading a team of three programmers to convert my many pages of design language into an actual computer program using the Harris Programming Language, or just HPL as it was called.  By this time HPL was yet another programming language for me, I think the seventh language by this point and HPL being based on the PASCAL language which one of the languages I had programming in before, I quickly became proficient at it.  It was early on after we started writing code in HPL that I began to have doubts about its effectiveness as a programming language for what we were doing, processing and formatting text.  HPL had no built in functionality for doing this.  I had done a fair amount of programming in the C programming language and found what I could do in C in one line took several in HPL. 

While I worked on the software, another team led the hardware design and development which was based on the latest 80286 microprocessor that had just come out.   The Harris Word Processing system had a central, mini refrigerator sized file server to which smart computer terminals were connected.  The smart computer terminals themselves had an 80286 processor in them but were not stand-alone but only worked when connected to the central file server.  Hard disks were expensive, too expensive and big to put one in each user terminal, even if they were “smart”,  so they all shared a common file server with hard disks.

Harris was nice place to work, with Julie also working there, we would drive together to work and had all the same friends.  Alan and Susan who were dating by this time, there were my diving buddies, Craig and Paul Smith, Eric still always wanting us to go fishing with him, and Russel who was the only one of the people from Harris that came to Julie and my wedding.  

Mom and Dad came down to Melbourne to visit on Valentine’s Day in February which just happened to be on a Sunday.  I got both Mom and Julie a orchid corsage which made Mom very happy and then we all went out for Sunday Brunch at a nice restaurant in a hotel on the beach which impressed Mom even more so that she wrote me a nice card the following week saying how much she enjoyed it.

In front of our house on Easy Street

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