8 Jul
2016
8 Jul
'16
11:19 a.m.
On 8 July 2016 at 20:00, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 07/08/2016 10:27 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
Aha. I have never seen an actual DisplayWriter -- note that final "r".
DisplayWrite (no "r" on the end) was a WP package for DOS. I believe
it looked & worked quite like a hardware DisplayWriter, but as I said,
I wouldn't know. I'm quite curious and I'm sorry I missed out on them.
Oddly, at least oddly I was told, quite a few people/companies bought
& used DisplayWrite even if they never had or used a hardware
DisplayWriter. It wasn't very competitive but it was good enough --
the "professional" tier of early DOS wordprocessors were all expensive
and rather arcane.
It's also something that seemed to cause a major divide across the
Atlantic, for some odd reason. Brits almost never paid for or
registered shareware, I'm told, whereas many North Americans did and
it could be a lucrative business.
Over here in Europe it wasn't taken very seriously so none of the
shareware WPs took off.
The American magazines I read talked of WPs I'd never seen -- and as a
professional skill I learned just about every WP program I could set
hands on on DOS and Mac. Brits used ones that were obscure in N
America, and vice versa.
Only hardcore IBM customers used DisplayWrite. It
had, naturally,
great support for IBM's (rather expensive but very solid) laser
printers, which were slightly competitive and popular around the end
of the 1980s/beginning of the 1990s. Odd spindly fonts, as I recall.
My first employers sold a lot of copies of Ashton-Tate MultiMate, as
it was the only mainstream network-aware WP for DOS LANs -- it
supported both Netware and 3Com 3+Share, which was also popular
around that time. It may have done file locking and network-drive
shared templates, but as you say, proportionally-spaced fonts were a
problem.
What I found surprising about the IBM Displaywriter was that much of the
"smarts" of the thing resided in the printer firmware itself (e.g.
underlining, bolding, etc.) and not the DW CPU unit--and, of course, the
printer used EBCDIC. There were a mess of PC word processors, as well as
CP/M ones.
WordPerfect, PerfectWriter, PC Write, Palantir, Electric Pencil...
Heard of the latter 2, never saw them.
Oh, and there was LetterPerfect, too, the cheap cut-down WordPerfect.
I recall that the preferred one for the AVR Eagle
systems was
Spellbinder and that it had a lot of adherents--I don't know if it was
ever offered for the PC platform.
I am not sure but I think so, yes.
On occasion, I still use an editor that I wrote for
CP/M and later
ported to DOS. 11KB and it has lots of features that are peculiar to my
preferences. I'd thought about porting it to Linux, but currently, it's
still in assembly and dealing with terminfo or curses is not something
that I look forward to. So I use Joe.
:-)
There are or were lots of odd editors for the PC. IBM E was one --
apparently it's quite like some mainframe tool. Came with PC-DOS and
was... strange.
--
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