What Is a Dedicated Word Processor?

Video transcription

I'm Jonathan Ayres with Network for Success and today we're going to talk about what is a dedicated word processor. A dedicated word processor is a program that resides on your computer, and as the name implies, it just does word processing. Now a dedicated word processor would not be able to do graphics, for example. So if we looked at a current word processor that we're all familiar with, Microsoft Word, then you'd say to yourself, "well is that a dedicated word processor?" And the answer's no, because you can do graphics, and you know, you could add pictures in and photos, you can put links in, you do all kinds of stuff that really make it in to a multi-use document processing tool. A dedicated word processor would be something much more like your text program. You'd see something like this on a PC, it would have the name of WordPad, for example. Now WordPad would just offer you dedicated word processing. You can't do anything else. You can't put any photographs in. You can put a link in but it's just going to look like text, and so forth. And these programs just allow you to do word processing because they want to be clean, efficient, fast, and have you focus on putting your words in. Now many years ago before we had individual personal computers, we had large computers called mainframes, and then just terminals with monitors at desks, and then we would have programs that were word processing programs that resided on the mainframes and were dedicated word processors because, boy, they didn't do anything else and that's where the term comes from in the old days, we had dedicated word processors. Now a days, we have Microsoft Word, and then if you want a dedicated word processor, you'll have to get a smaller program like WordPad or text program.