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.
In: 412
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
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