word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz)

On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: You are right and I use Joe daily, hmm, more like hourly. I'm typing this message in it, right now, in fact. It's my $EDITOR and default composition editor in Alpine, my go-to mail client. Some of us perhaps, but after writing a few hundred thousand lines of code in Borland IDEs in the 1990s, I couldn't forget the keystrokes if I wanted to, I think. I liked both of them. The coolest thing about Wordperfect was how they actually paid attention to the fact that white text on a blue background was supposedly easier on ones eyes. I believe there was some kind of research into this, but I'm not sure if it was the by Wordperfect Corp. My recollection of that time was that, as soon as the unwashed masses saw that GUIs were going to be the norm on microcomputers, they were well-past-done with anything character based. I don't actually see that as 100% positive progress, though. I see it as emblematic of how "users" see computers, with both good and bad implications. Greater accessibility means more overall benefit to more people, and that's a good thing. However, too much over-simplification leads to a form of learned helplessness and a bigger chasm between the technical, and non-technical users. ... not that M$ didn't simply co-opt the lesson from others who'd been doing it for a very long time. However, it's not such a bad thing to learn You are right, most did prefer it. However, at the time, I remember much wailing and gnashing of teeth as people who had mastered WP screamed at Word for trying to outsmart them and they couldn't simply delete the offending control character to reverse the automagically-helpy "features" they are always trying to shovel into Word/Office. I personally still find Word to be an infuriating abomination no matter how many Paper Clips, ribbon-interfaces, or hollywood-squares-metro GUIs they put on it. A slime mold in a dress is still just a greasy disgusting fungus. Boy did Wordperfect go down in flames quick, though. I won't argue that M$ cleaned their clock in record time. It seemed like in only a couple of years they went from total-domination to being bought by... Corel (?!). Hmm, IMHO, I'd say that it's still pretty equal and if there was any edge, it'd go to EMACS editing mode and keystrokes (especially ctrl-a and ctrl-e). It has a lot to do with what things like libreadline supports by default and what editing mode your shell defaults to. I don't personally like dealing with any kind of termdef/termcap/terminal-control and so I nearly always go looking for someone else's code who's already slogged through editing modes and UTF-8. Well, I do understand were this comes from. UNIX folks were dealing with a sort of multi-culturalism problem. Since it runs on so many hardware platforms and interoperates with tons of terminal types (and DOS or Windows either didn't exist yet, or didn't run on those platforms), folks are (even still) hand-wringing a lot about terminals that have different cursor key mappings et al. That's always the explanation you hear around why VI cursor movement keys aren't (just) arrow keys, and also include 'h', 'j', 'k', and 'l'. So, I don't understand why, after x86 has absolutely dominated the computing scene for a few decades, that there is any excuse left for editors or terminal emulators that screw up the cursor movement keys right outta the box. It's not like there are that many types of keyboard scancodes for cursor keys on PeeCees (and heck, even non-PC UNIX hardware that uses PS/2 or USB keyboards). I don't accept the excuses about 100's of terminal types in the 1980's. That was just too long ago to still be moaning about today. Most of those terminals are in landfills, too. A few hobbyists like me might have some or play with them, but if you are pimping a UNIX variant today and you can't deal (by default out of the box) with cursor keys: your vendor or project needs a reality check. Lame excuses about old terminals making it "hard" are totally worn out and only sound laughable in 2016. However, to be fair, most of those cursor-keys-don't-work issues come from terminal mismatches as folks move between systems on a single terminal session, not ill-maintained PC keyboard + VGA console terminal code. Sounds like you have a much broader experience with word processors than I do, then. I remember some of those, but I wasn't a user of any besides the first two (Wordstar and Wordperfect). -Swift