2 Dec
2010
2 Dec
'10
6:46 p.m.
On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 10:28 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
"baby duck syndrome" is not ALWAYS the first
exposure. ?Sometimes it is
the an early (not necessarily first) ENJOYABLE exposure, or the first
system that one bonded to.
I do not miss "Electric Pencil". ?much.
nor Scripsit.
And I'm over my bond with Wordstar.
I used Windoze "WRITE" for my PhD written exams (first one in the UC
Library and Information school to use a computer for them!)
Oh my yes.
Back in the day, I was somewhere between /au fait/ and expert with
WordStar (4 & 5, sure, but also 1512 and 2000), DisplayWrite,
MultiMate, MS Word 3 & 4 for DOS and various others, not to mention
WordPerfect, which swept them all before it before Windows swept it
away in turn - meaning Samna Am? at first. Plus a bunch of Mac WPs,
two Sinclair Spectrum ones (Tasword and The Last Word), Acorn View,
various incarnations of LocoScript and more I've doubtless forgotten.
But by the early 1990s, Windows and CUA replaced the lot.
CUA-compliant editors ran on DOS, Windows, Mac and now GNOME and KDE.
Now I think in CUA keystrokes and it's an effort to recall any other
ones. I *really* don't miss them. Not at all.
No, not even WordPerfect. Never liked it much, just had to support it.
Too many function-key combinations.
(Aside: I have recently, for a laugh, got MS-Word 5.5 for DOS running
under DOSemu under Linux. And 6.0 for that matter, but 5.5 is a free
download from MS. I actually could work in that, still - because 5.5
is the version that went CUA.)
FTAOD: CUA = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_User_Access
What I'd /really/ like as a writing tool would be a CUA mode for
EMACS. I find its native UI bizarre and incomprehensible - if I have
to edit text at a Unix prompt, I use Vi, badly - but reading comments
like Neal Stephenson's in /In The Beginning Was The Command Line/
<http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html> make me think it might
be the ultimate writers' tool. I'm damned if I'm learning another new
set of keybindings [a] at my age and [b] in a world where CUA has
killed off everything else and now rules the GUI world.
--
Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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