Bravo (word processor)

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Bravo was the first WYSIWYG - word processing program . It already supported several fonts and ran on the Xerox Alto , the first computer with a graphical user interface. It was developed at the Xerox PARC research center by Butler Lampson , Charles Simonyi and other employees in 1974 .

Bravo was a so-called "modal" editor . The letters written on the keyboard were commands processed by Bravo. As a result of the graphical user interface ( GUI ), Bravo already offered support for the computer mouse , with which the cursor could be positioned and text marked, but no commands could be given.

In addition to a long list of commands for controlling the formatting of the text (e.g. to set the left and right margins of text or the fonts) Bravo also supported the use of multiple buffers and multiple windows.

Although Bravo usually displayed the text with formatting (e.g. justified , accented text, proportional fonts), it usually did not try to achieve a print-identical representation. But the screen only achieved a resolution of 72  dpi , while the laser printers used at Xerox PARC achieved 300 dpi. Therefore, the screen of that time could only offer an approximate print preview in contrast to today's screen, which was aimed at in a special display mode. But even in this mode there was the problem that individual letters or words deviated slightly from the actual print image (which is still present in today's word processing programs).

Bravo successor was BravoX, which was also developed under the direction of Charles Simonyi in Xerox '"Advanced Systems Development" group and was intended for commercial use. In contrast to Bravo, BravoX was a "mode-free" editor.

Bravo was also a predecessor for the word processing program Gypsy , published in 1975 by Larry Tesler and Timothy Mott at Xerox PARC , which was equipped for the first time with a graphical user interface that could be operated with a computer mouse and which today includes functions such as blinking input marking, double-clicks to highlight words and the function " Cut / Copy and Paste " included.

literature

  • Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (HarperCollins, New York, 1999) pp. 194-201. ISBN 0887309895
  • Douglas K. Smith & Robert C. Alexander, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (iUniverse, Nebraska, 1999), ISBN 1583482660

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fridtjof Küchemann: Copy and paste. In: Frkf. General Currently , February 29, 2020, accessed on the same day.