9 Jul
2014
9 Jul
'14
4:39 p.m.
On Wed, Jul 09, 2014 at 11:18:49PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
Well, for all that Robert J Sawyer & George R R
Martin swear by
WordStar, I normally swore *at* it and think that 30y later it's
eminently whinable-about. :?)
I never really used WordStar, but wasn't the Turbo Pascal editor supposed
to use sort of the same command set? I remember some wonderful line in the
TP manual that claimed that with practice, the commands would become an
extension of your own mind, or some mildly creepy thing like that. So if
I have that right, *they* liked it. I had a text editor and a homegrown
RUNOFF-like thing that was good enough for what I was doing.
Find it hard to live without, myself, now I've got
used to it. Going
from Xenix back to MS-DOS 4, I even used the MS-DOS Shell menuing GUI
app-launcher's task swapping capabilities sometimes.
Never looked into that. I was always sorry there wasn't any attempt in
DOS itself (apart from some overseas version of V4 maybe?) to do multi-tasking,
since it would have been easy enough to do at least what RT-11 does. I was
always careful to retry my GETBLOCK calls endlessly, just in case in the
future (or even the present, thanks to pop-up TSRs), the largest available
block turns out to already not be available afterwards, if some other thread
is nibbling away at memory while I'm trying to get some.
John Wilson
D Bit