Hi guys, I was recently browsing some quotes out of boredom, and saw one said by Jobs:
“The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel – one that reads like a mystery to most people. They’re not going to learn slash q-z any more than they’re going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.”
I can understand the meaning behind it but got curious about the phrase “slash q-z” as it seems not to be a common word and cannot find much about it on Google.
Edit: thanks for all the wonderful answers guys, it’s really interesting to look back see how far we’ve come from.
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I think “slash q-z” might be referring to the keyboard shortcut of pressing the slash key followed by the letters q and z together
It’s a way to emphasize that some things, like Morse code, are outdated and not worth learning anymore.
A lot of these old computer programs had weird and complicated key codes to work.
The very popular word processor software, wordstar, was a case in point. There was no mouse to click on a point of the screen, these computers may not even have had arrow keys. So to use these programs you had to learn a long list of sequences.
For example if you wanted to move the cursor down to the next line of text, you had to type a series of 3 key sequence: / Q Z
Wordstar is a word processor that came before GUI’s (graphical user interfaces). And in those days, there wasn’t a mouse either – so moving around the document etc had to be done using keyboard short cuts or arrow keys.
In particular, to format your document, you had to embed printer, format or control codes like /b words here /b to make the “words here” print in bold on the printer (just an example – I cannot remember those commands). Other stuff like inserting page breaks, adjust line spacing etc all required these codes. So to make a reasonable looking printed document (primarily how things like reports were submitted in those days) the user had to embed these printer control codes into their document.
Not sure about slash q-z but I vaguely recall things like dot commands (.xx) and control (^xx) stuff.
Slash commands (i.e. commands that were started by typing a ‘/‘) were very typical shortcuts in word processors/spreadsheets back in the pre-GUI/command-line/DOS era of computing.
A good modern analogy would be all the memes you see in Linux/Unix-based communities these days about not being able to exit vi.
Steve Jobs was envisioning a computing world where someone could intuitively figure out how to do something “simple” like saving a file without having to read a 400-page manual that explains literally everything the software can do (most of which the majority of users will never need/want to do).
Switching from (for example) WordPerfect to MS Word back in the day was a monumental task; not only were you learning new commands, but you had to un-learn the muscle memory you had from the previous software.
In the old days, people didn’t have mice, just keyboards.
So programs used key combinations or key sequences to do things. People would read the paper manual, and have a quick reference card next to their computer full of the most common key combinations. (You couldn’t fit every command on an A4 / US Letter sized card, though sometimes people had larger references).
Some programs, like the text editor VIM, had a command line to let you type in commands. For example, the “:” key to start a command, then “q!” and press return to quit without saving. (I don’t know any other Vim commands, that’s the one command that everyone needed to know in case they ended up in Vim by accident).
Some programs, like the early spreadsheet “Lotus 1-2-3”, used the slash key (/) to bring up a menu. This would give you a list of commands, with a key for each. In modern Excel you might click on the File menu and click Exit. In 1-2-3 you might press / to bring up the main menu, then press F for the File menu and Q to Quit. (It’s been a long time since I used 1-2-3, so I remember the slash key but forget what the menu items were).
There were no standards for how the user interface works, the industry was experimenting trying to find the best way to do it.
I didn’t use WordStar, but it would have been vaguely similar to the others I’ve mentioned, while being completely different in all the details.
Thanks all for the explanation guys 🙂
I was working at a company in 1988 when a college pulled me into his office and told me about this weird thing he had plugged into his computer. He told me it was called a mouse.
I asked of what the hell that was for, and he said it was going to make it easier to move the cursor around on the screen.
I have been working for more than 10 years at that point using keystrokes. Actually, I still do. I’m old-fashioned that way. Okay, TBH, I’m old.
I’ll be honest and tell you I no longer remember what that particular keystroke means, and it causes me a little bit of trouble when people ask me how to do things at my work because they don’t understand how to do keystrokes and I don’t know how to do it using the mouse without a lot of digging.
Started off with the VI text editor on a Unix computer.
I loved WordStar. And PFSWrite.
Then came WordPerfect. That lasted for a lot of years. I took a job in the early ’90s at a medical device manufacturer. I worked on a team whose job was to convert the entire company from the WordPerfect application to Microsoft office, specifically Microsoft Word.
It was a corporate mandate, based on licensing requirements.
You would have thought we had sprouted horns and tails.
The toughest people to convert were the assistants, of which I was one. They came around eventually, because there was no alternative.
Now we b**** about updates. I maintain that updates are the equivalent of someone breaking into your house and rearranging your furniture for know what the reason than because they can.
I learned that we like what we know. Change sucks, but it is inevitable.
Thank you for the trip down memory lane. I’ll take my walker with the tennis balls and show myself out.
Another point to remember if that in the 70s, unlike today, there was no standard keyboard. Different manufacturers had different layouts, and even different range by one manufacturer could be different. Producing a program that would work on a wide variety many you had to rely on the standard characters
Adding to the others: /qz was not the Wordstar exit key sequence. It was Ctrl+K Ctrl+X. Jobs was making up something that sounded nerdy-complicated, like how you might say, “Sure, it’s easy, just hit X double-right-click reverse lowercase q.” He may have gotten it wrong on purpose to make a point: “See, it is so complicated that even I, Steve Jobs, can’t be bothered to learn it.”
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