2 – Text Documents

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the technology which handles characters. The ability of computers to manipulate text includes searching, formatting, and other operations. In the mid-1970s the Bell Telephone Laboratories company newspaper started running word puzzles for amusement and was surprised when a group of people with a machine-readable dictionary proved they were able to answer these puzzles as fast as they could be typed in. Today, anyone with a personal computer and a CD-ROM dictionary can do this. The most notable success of computing has been in document preparation, with the word processing industry now dominated by programs such as Microsoft Word. Almost nothing in a commercial setting is typed on traditional typewriters any more, let alone written by hand. As a byproduct of this machine conquest, almost everything now written is available in machine-readable form, and its reuse in other ways is easy and widespread. The new word processing technology has produced vast online databases. These came originally as byproducts of computer typesetting.