While I was a Concordia I experienced the frustration of writing papers without the benefit of any sort of typesetting or formatting tools. Word processing didn’t exist yet.
Having only the university’s huge and cumbersome mainframe computer to work on (A CDC Cyber computer), I set out to solve this problem for myself by writing a rudimentary formatting program. On this computer model it was especially difficult because lower-case letters took two storage places (not exactly “bytes” because this was a decimal computer with variable length “words” — see below) while upper-case characters took a single place. So something simple like underlining a word was a huge undertaking. Printers were not able to underline a word without first printing the word (or line) and then backspacing to the beginning and adding the underline characters!
A brief web description of the unique features of the CDC Cyber computers: “The Cybers were interesting systems in that they were even then “throwback” systems. They used 60-bit words, octal arithmetic, one’s-complement arithmetic (which meant there is a negative zero as well as a positive zero, and they were sometimes not equal to each other), non-hierarchical file systems with seven-character file names, and used character coding unique to CDC (not BCD, not ASCII, and not EBCDIC, it was called “display code”). The fact that the Cyber 170 architecture used a word length that was not a power of two caused a few problems when programming at the bit level, and dealing with the 8-bit bytes that everybody else used (e.g. the AMS systems and offline plotters) made for an interesting challenge. “
Anyone who understands the above will recognize that creating a word processor on such a computer was a difficult task. No one would choose to use this computer for word processing, but I had no other choice.
As I worked on this and started using it a bit, some other grad students saw it and asked if they could use it. I realized that I actually had something to offer. So I worked hard at adding all sorts of features, and created what I called TypeSet. Many grad students started using it, and I even took feature requests from students and professors, adding many new features before I left in 1976. I heard it was still in use sometime after I left — until the first simple word processing programs came out on mini and micro-computers a few years later.
I’ve attached my TypeSet user manual — which was created entirely using TypeSet itself! By today’s standards it is laughable, but in 1975 on a mainframe, it was quite revolutionary!
Read a bit of the Typeset manual (below) to see how ridiculously complex a task it was to create a Typeset document. Yet because there was nothing better yet available, it enjoyed some popularity for a few years!