The simplest programs that do word processing are known as text editors. These programs are designed to be small, simple, and cheap. Almost every operating system made has at least one built in text editor. Most text editors save files in a special format called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange --- Whew!) ASCII is a coding convention that almost all computers understand. Each letter is assigned a numeric value that will fit in eight digits of binary notation. "a" is 97 in ASCII, and "A" is 65. All the numeric digits, and most punctuation marks also have numeric values in ASCII. You certainly don't need to memorize all the codes, (That's the text editor's job.) but you should recognize the word " ASCII". The biggest advantage of this scheme is that almost any program can read and write ASCII text.
Text editors can be wonderful programs. The biggest advantage is the price. There is probably already one or more installed on your computer. You can find a number of text editors for free on the Internet. Text editors are also very easy to learn. Since they don't do a lot of fancy things, they are generally less intimidating than full fledged word processor packages with all kinds of features. Finally, text editors are pretty universal. Since they almost all use the ASCII standard, you can read a text file written on any text editor with just about any text editor. This is often not the case when using fancier programs.
The ability to write ASCII text is the biggest benefit of text editors. ASCII is also the biggest disadvantage of most text editors. It is a very good way of storing text information, but it has no way of handling more involved formatting. Text editors generally do not allow you to do things like change font sizes or styles, spell checking, or columns. (If you don't know what those things are, stay tuned. We will talk about them later in this chapter.)
If all you want to do is get text written, and you aren't too concerned about how fancy it looks, text editors are fine. (In fact, the first draft of this book was partially written in Emacs, a text editor for the UNIX operating system.)
Common text editor programs: