On 13 Apr 2007 at 7:34, John Foust wrote:
Which platform, which program?
Platform? Program? It's whatever the box does when you turn it on.
In the past week, I've done a set from a Smith Corona typewriter and
another from a Brother word processor. Olivetti and Brother seem
to be the common "platforms"--and the Brother 240/120K GCR diskettes
seem to be very common.
I suspect that a fair number of people just don't want to fool with a
conventional general-purpose PC and cherish their old WP equipment.
One customer was lamenting that her old IBM Displaywriter (or rather
its printer) finally gave up the ghost. She was using it well into
1999.
Contrast the simplicity of a box that's ready when you power it on
and requires no external software to load and which writes all the
work on diskettes to a modern PC.
I can appreciate the attitude. I can open a can with a Swiss Army
knife (heck, I probably could *make* a can with one), but a
contentional can opener is simpler and cheaper and does the job
better. Professional writers are more concerned with getting their
thoughts down and less concerned about "pretty".
I think there are some simple ideas that are not amenable to
"improvment" by addition of extra functionality. I've still not
figured out all of the weird settings on my FM receiver, even though
it affords no more additional functionality than the receiver I
purchased in 1968. And, although it has a volume control knob, it
lacks a tuning knob, a shortcoming in my book.
Terak? By non-graphic, do you mean not windowed or
not bitmapped?
Terak was bitmapped, but it had loadable customizable fonts, so it
handled Hebrew and Elvish.
I was thinking along the lines of "downloadable proportional fonts
with hardware kerning".
Cheers,
Chuck