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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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.
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