That was until Scriptor launched in January 1983 at $495 a unit, over $1,400 in today’s dollars. Making sure character names were above their dialogue at 3.7 inches from the left side of the page, parentheticals (or wrylies) were 3.1 inches from the left, and dialogue was properly spaced from the right and left margins-users would have to do all this manually. That is, there was no floppy disk on the market that you could buy, stick into your computer system, and then have an easy-to-use platform that would let you write a screenplay and format it properly. There was no word processing software specifically for screenwriters at this time. Whether they were still learning how to turn a computer on or they already knew how to hack a mainframe, if a writer wanted to hammer out a screenplay on a newfangled Compaq Plus Portable, an IBM 5150, or something called an “Apple II,” their options were limited. In the era of Beverly Hills Cop and Ghostbusters, over half of adults who used a computer at home said that they were “still learning to use it.” They were also decidedly middle class, between 25 and 44 years old, had college educations, worked managerial, technical, or white-collar jobs, and reported over $25,000 a year in income-the rough equivalent of $71,263 in 2022. Census Bureau reported only eight percent of households owned a computer (compared to 92% in 2018). Paper had been invented and the printing press, too, and with it, a little brother called “the typewriter.” It was on these, for the first seventy-odd years of Hollywood filmmaking, that the screenplays for early film classics would be written.īut by the 1980s and 1990s, screenwriters began to adopt computers as their writing tool of choice. The early novelists wrote by hand, using quill pens to write on parchment or vellum. Surveying the history of Screenwriting Software
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