4. To scroll just means to move from place to place in your electronic document. It’s like rolling or unrolling a Torah or other scroll, except here there’s no ink or paper, just patterns of electrons in your computer memory and dots on your screen. On most computer monitors you see only 24 lines of typing at a time.
5. A menu lists commands on your screen. It can tell you how to locate a document on your disk or what to do while you’re at work there.
6. A block move is the ability to move material from one part of your document to another.
7. A global search tracks down specified words in your document.
8. A search and replace substitutes one word (or group of words) for another.
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WordStar’s creators, Seymour Rubinstein and Rob Barnaby, are like Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz of Citizen Kane. The movie would have been hack melodrama without the brilliance of both the producer-director and his writer; and yet critics still argue over Kane’s exact origins. So it is with WordStar. When Time said Rubinstein had written the program, a friend of Barnaby’s whipped off an angry letter to the editor. I won’t take sides here. Rubinstein, however, far from playing down Barnaby’s WordStar role to me, unhesitatingly passed on his phone number when I asked. Barnaby is equally willing to acknowledge the importance of his collaborator. Even the letter writer emphasizes the usefulness of Rubinstein’s salesmanship and his perception of the software market back in the late 1970s when WordStar was born.
A short, stocky, bespectacled man in his fifties, Rubinstein grew up in New York City, the son of a pinball- and novelty-machine owner who died while Seymour was still in grade school. His mother worked as a clerk. “My first job,” Rubinstein said, “was a helper on a fruit truck when I was twelve years old.” Two years later, however, his neighbors were “letting me ruin their radios,” and by his mid-twenties, he seemed settled into the routine of a TV repairman.
But Rubinstein grew restless after six months’ reserve military duty in the 1950s; he attended night school at Brooklyn College and took up technical writing.
Decades later he recalled a navigational computer he encountered while a civilian, speaking as if it were his “Rosebud,” as if he were Charles Kane thinking about the Colorado snows and the name on his childhood sled. He gave me the machine’s exact measurements, eight by nine by twelve inches. Then, mixing nostalgia with awe, he said, “If you opened it up, it would look like a Swiss watchmaker’s nightmare, all those gears and little electronic things whirring and clicking away. But with it you could take off from an aircraft carrier and circle overhead and press the reset button and fly anywhere you wanted, and wherever you flew, an indicator kept track of how far you were from that spot on the ocean and told how you could return.” Ask Rubinstein about his early career and you may hear more talk of machines than of people. “$2” The hardware, however, helped make the man. Rubinstein spent years working with data-communications networks—the ones that, for instance, handle airline reservations or credit-card information. Without quick, accurate updating, these real-time systems are worthless: just ask anyone whom an airline has booked on an already-full flight. You could have the best-designed computers in the cosmos. But the question in the end may be “Did the airline clerk key in reservations for you on the right flight at the right time?” And Rubinstein’s software philosophy later reflected his real-time work. He originally did not intend WordStar for the bumbling and the lazy but for “the production typist” on whom the boss heavily counted for both speed and accuracy.