word processor history -- interesting article (Evan Koblentz)

On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: That's the very reason I teach Vi in classes but privately still use Joe extensively. I prefer muscle-memory-macro-keystrokes over what I'd call "conscious modes". I respect the ideas in Vi, and occasionally I dwell in it a lot and code there etc... I play some musical editor games. I even occasionally use the Motif-based "nedit" (esp on SGI boxen, it just ... feels... right). However, I feel most natural in Joe. I think it's simply just a "style" or taste issue based on past comfort with the WS and descendants. Familiarity that I'm not trying to pass off as any superiority in WS-family editors. I tell folks that Vi is still essential if you want to be a Unix bad-ass. Knowing even it's most primitive forms is helpful if you dive into ancient platforms and want to fix old code or impress girls with your regex acumen and flawless command-mode incantations. I figure if politicians can mix truth with lies, I can dabble, too. Do you happen to know that backstory about the color research? I remember that, but only vaguely. Clerks, admins, secretaries, receptionists, record hounds, and many others were freakin' ninjas with them. My mom was a Q&A Write disciple, still uses it in DOSBox, and still can do things with it I can't reproduce without coding. I know they were sorta arcane, and I won't lie and say I was a WP badass, but I witnessed some word processing badassery in conjunction with it by the aforementioned tradeswomen and men. Remember that scene in one of the Star Trek movies where he firsts exclaims "You mean it's a MANUAL!" when he's told the computer he's attempting to voice command won't respond ? You think he's going to fumble with the keyboard then he starts typing so fast you think he's about the smoke the model M or whatever he's bangin' on at lightspeed. Some folks are like that with their word processing skills... My awesome grandma was. Maybe you are one! You definitely seem to have written extensively and general. Ah yes, I remember discovering that to my delight as well. Yeah, I have a massive DOS collection o' piracy and purchases that are slowly coalescing over the years into a few organized VMs and DOSBox instances I've been nurturing. I'll take your *Word* for it (ugh, sorry). I do remember it had a spiffy B&W graphical splash screen with someone writing with a pen, IIRC. Maybe that was 5.5. I think I have it around somewhere too, blaspheming some bits in one of my archives. :-P Well, I think also that when commercial software puts effort into simply giving people what the want. It's like that old saying about people in democracies getting the government they deserve. In commercial software money = voting. People appear to *want* some of the garbage we have these days. Either that, or corporations are so powerful they can afford to be tone-deaf and full of hubris toward their customers. Hmm, wait I just remembered I'm a Comcast customer: my only option for fast Internet access. They rape me for vulgar sums and I just suck it up quietly; no choice. I hear ya. I've been doing a lot of fiddlin' with old 68k Macs and anything before Open Transport was, uhm, not so great. Even then, it's damn fragile and I feel like it's going to lock up at any time or this guy is going to show up and lecture me: GI: Joe PSA - "Stop all the DOWNLOADIN!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eA3XCvrK90 Hehe, nice. At least you have a sense of humor about your heresy. :-) I can't even stand *trying* it now. 2003 is the last one I could even sit in front of. When recruiters or HR folks *DEMAND* my resume in Word, that's what I reach for. Been burned too many times by trying to export you tried. Most of the time they will grudgingly accept PDFs. I imagine myself smoldering and shaking with tremors the whole time spent in that shameful act of kowtowing to the man, though. :-> At least I have the decency to run it in CrossOver. That's my only defense. Long gone are the days I could send my resume over to an engineering manager as a man-page and someone would actually think it was cool. I'll have to dig it up while I have my two 68k's out. I've seen other with the same despairing praise. Kinda sad. I've used it off and on over the years, but it's too heavy for me. I know what it's about, and it's cool that some folks get all zealous about it, but I never really caught the bug for it. Actually, FreeBSD does that quite nicely for me on PCs. It's just that almost *nothing* takes advantage of it by default because UNIX coders like to target the lowest common denominator that still has screen control: vt100. Unfortunately, it's colorless. However bold underline and several other attributes are, available and somewhat underused, IMO. I assume you are speaking of using modern Linux with the framebuffer console. It does perform nicely and has always been a joy, I agree. However, even DOS ANSI color sequences are still a bit more visually flexible. I'd be with them on that. Experience has definitely given me that perspective. Hehe. Okay, let me come to FreeBSD's defense a bit on this one. It's really really popular as a server OS in some industries. To this day, a lot of the datacenters I've worked in (and still do quite a bit) still have more available serial access (via big-az concentrators that run on Cat5-to-RS232 mostly) than they have fancy IP-KVMs or similar. Just about all serious servers have serial-rendering modes for the BIOS, the setup tools, everything... So, FreeBSD runs in these places and they keep the console at the rough level you describe because it makes it WAY more convenient to run/install FreeBSD on either these types of environments or virutalized ones that want to have a virtual serial console you can multiplex into some big management tool et al. Soooo, the point of describing that is that it might really piss some people off that FreeBSD doesn't install with graphical options (but PC-BSD does) and doesn't automatically flip into a framebuffer console when it can clearly see that you have VESA capable hardware attached. They assume you're more likely to be trying to get something done on a crappy DRAC/ILO virtual console or via serial etc... When linux flips into 1920x1080 on one of those out-of-band access devices it's a huge pain to manage the window. Not to mention that you can use the serial remote console on most HP ILOs for free, but if you want a graphical console (like Linux FBcon will require) then you pay $$$ for an "ILO Advanced" license. Lawyering bastiches. So, FreeBSD just gives friendly nods to folks buried deep in IT, too. It's not all nostalgia and curmudgeons throwing poop at new ideas. Also, NetBSD has a framebuffer console a lot like Linux's. However, it doesn't play well with 'fbset' (from Linux land) which is quite nice for folks doing things like arcade cabinet timing adjustment and the like. Nonetheless, it's quite capable, but you do need to compile it into your kernel which sets the bar a bit high for newcomers to easily use it. Most folks just dive straight to an X display manager anyhow (like KDM, GDM, or XDM). Disklabels are finally going out of fashion, even for BSD folks. We're moving to "wedges", GPT partitions, ZFS metadata labels, and all that happy stuff. Unless of course you are using DragonFly BSD and playing with HAMMER which is also quite advanced feature-wise, resembling a cross between WAFL, CXFS, and ZFS. Coming from DOS, I had some of those feelings way back when I first encountered SunOS. However, I got over it quickly when I saw the brighter spots in the OS and understood the logic once I dove into volume management schemes of the day and now. Early disk management wasn't one of BSD's strongest points. There was no GEOM, no RAIDFrame, no LVM, and for sure no ZFS. Nowadays, with GPT and ZFS you can feel super-modern, have sky-high (well, zettabyte, literally) file system limits, too. Not to mention dominating performance, and tunability to anything else I've encountered using ZFS's tunables and taking advantage of ultra-fast block devices for L2ARC and ZIL caching (much better than with BTRFS volumes or LVM2 caching I've tried). You also can flip on deduplication or multiple compression types if you get bored. With block-level encryption, at the volume management level, you can also get as paranoid as you like. Anyhow, BSD is now, IMHO, a seriously powerful storage/server OS with awesome capabilities that mostly cost big money from commercial vendors and performs with panache'. Modern FreeBSD also has great network package management and dependency solving with the newish 'pkg' tool now poised to supersede the independent binaries such as pkg_info, pkg_add etc... without harming flexibility via it's clever CLI layering. If I were going to bust on FreeBSD it wouldn't be for storage/partitioning woes (though before ZFS the diskabel interface in the installer is a bit painful) or on it's really basic defaults for video and terminal settings. If I was going to pick on FreeBSD, it'd be for it's (soon to be over in v11) lagging X11 driver efforts especially for Intel Haswell (out a long ways back in computer time fellas). Damn, man you got mauled by some UNIX boxes. They *can* do all that, but I'll admit they do manage to screw those things up a heckuva lot more than I ever remember even ANSI + DOS doing. I blame the huge diversity, too, but I don't excuse the modern instances where I too am a saying "c'mon guys, is it really that hard to let me use the !#$@ing arrow keys?" If I can find and fix those bugs with my modest skills, then let's get busy. Of course, I have had some patches accepted for such annoyances before, so at least I'm not just slingin' mud at my precious UNIX variants. :-) I'm just trying to be clear eyed. Sadly, you aren't alone. I have some good (smart) friends who also complain that UNIX folks are mean to them in online forums and rude to the uninitiated acting as if they hold special power the rubes will never understand. I find that pretty frustrating. I want to teach people about the wonderful, beautiful, awesome parts of the blessed continuum of Unix goodness out there. I want them to behold with the same wonder my kick ass collection of gloriously Unixy things. So, I hate hearing my brothers are being rude to the noobs (as annoying as they are sometimes) who are just struggling to bring up their Ubuntu box or whatever. I guess when I've got my back up on some stuff like that it's because I feel like people won't work to learn like I did and the only way out is *through*. However, there isn't any real reason for being rude, so that's always a shame to hear. BSD can use DOS disk partitions, too, but as you pointed out earlier they further complicate it with disklabels and don't give you the option to simply use the partitions "raw" without having to fiddle with a label. That's kind of the intention of "wedges" but with a lot more flexibility and less of the disklabel suck. BTRFS and ZFS go a completely different direction and suck up the whole disk making it none of your business what they are are doing with it, mostly. That has good and bad effects, but the overall feel for me has been positive. Though I still have some instances were it's easier just to deal with partitions and LVM. Heh, well there is some "spunk" in the BSD spirit where folks get downright religious about leaving some things alone. I'm one of those dudes who sees BSD flip the finger, as you point out, but says "You go girl!" and applauds the raised-finger. However, I do still get off the BSD bus at the corner of Termdef Ave and Colorblind Street fairly close to your place. I read your other posts on the topic and skimmed the blog post. You ain't kiddin'. It sounds like it was a bit more than just collecting, too. I haven't heard of about 1/3rd of the ones you mention, at a minimum. Hehehe. Now I have to go find it and try it! Your mini-"review" reminds me a bit of this wonderful (but terribly critical) video game review of "Big Rigs" that cracked me up: "[...] The graphical problems don't stop there, either. Big Rigs is easily one of the worst-looking PC games released in years. The truck models are amazingly terrible," http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/big-rigs-over-the-road-racing-review/1900-6… -Swift