On 07/07/2016 11:31 AM, Rod Smallwood wrote: The point is that word processing predates wide use of microprocessors. For a time, I ran a Diablo Hitype I OEM model connected to a 3-parallel port S100 card under WS The OEM models are essentially dumb units with spacing, carriage motion, etc. controlled by the host. Even then, word processors were old. To this day, I still use "joe" as my all-around text editor under Linux and BSD. It uses mostly WS key conventions. --Chuck

On 07/07/2016 01:53 PM, Terry Stewart wrote: I've used emacs on and off since the early 80s., along with some add-ons, such as "Electric C" and "mince" )= "Mince is not emacs.). I never felt comfortable with it. And I've written enough troff stuff to have forgotten most of what I learned. For document prep, does anyone still use Interleaf? --Chuck

"Wordstar on an 4.077 MHz 8088 could keep up with my typing; WinWord under Windoze on a 300 MHz PII can't." --Seth Breidbart You can tell how old the quote is: it cites a PII/300. I see it in monitors. I've been repeatedly annoyed by modern flatscreens that refuse to even try to do what CRTs from twenty years ago routinely did. "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry." - credited to Henry Petroski by someone on a mud I hang out on. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On Thu, 7 Jul 2016, Mouse wrote: I'll pile on, too. I'm always grumbling about monitors that use some kind of super-crap algorithm to scale the bitmap (bicubic smear-a-polation). Lord have mercy, just give me the damn pixels on 1/3rd of the monitor and give me the *option* to scale it if I want. Why is it so hard to understand that nobody wants to run an LCD in it's "non-native" resolution. It always looks like crap! Well, there is a bright side to this, also. When you run older OSes or app software on new modern hardware, it's amazingly fast. I guess the key is to upgrade your hardware and just ignore most "advancements" in software. However, I'm sure most folks just head-nod at the normal pat-response: "But but but, you won't get security updates!" My response is that if a modern "IT guy" can't figure out how to put that system behind a firewall and properly take steps to version-lock the environment: fire him. He's a shill for the Evil Ones trying to sell us all tickets on the upgrade train with a free side of snake oil. Defense in depth means you *can* defend at multiple points, not just rely on the vendor to constantly give you blind binary patches for the OS and call that "good". Yet, when I talk about version locking as a set of procedures, people often don't even know what I'm getting at. They haven't even been introduced to the idea and only know the corporate refrain of hyper-upgrade-orthadoxy. It's a real accomplishment for the software industry, really. I can't think of any other instance where fat-cats are easily convinced to spend vulgar amounts of money on things that actually don't add squat to the bottom line. Is there that much peer pressure at the country club? Are the sales reps really *that* hot? On a related note, even though I have an Amiga 3000, I often use UAE because it's just so damn fast. It's fun, sometimes to see The Last Ninja at 1000 FPS. :-P -Swift

On 7 July 2016 at 20:31, Rod Smallwood <rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com> wrote: Nope. Sorry. Those aren't WordStar commands. They are CUA commands, adopted by more or less all GUIs. They're from the IBM CUA project, part of the SAA plan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access WordStar commands for that operation would be: Mark beginning of block: ^K B Mark end of block: ^K K (WordStar did not allow block selection with the cursor keys.) Then, use the cursor keys or to your destination position. Then, to copy: ^K C Or to move: ^K V Here's a reference: http://www.wordstar.org/index.php/wsemu-documentation/wsemu-commands-and-me… -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)

On 08/07/2016 01:28, Liam Proven wrote: Ho Hum I ask understanding for seniors memory. Rod

On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: You are right and I use Joe daily, hmm, more like hourly. I'm typing this message in it, right now, in fact. It's my $EDITOR and default composition editor in Alpine, my go-to mail client. Some of us perhaps, but after writing a few hundred thousand lines of code in Borland IDEs in the 1990s, I couldn't forget the keystrokes if I wanted to, I think. I liked both of them. The coolest thing about Wordperfect was how they actually paid attention to the fact that white text on a blue background was supposedly easier on ones eyes. I believe there was some kind of research into this, but I'm not sure if it was the by Wordperfect Corp. My recollection of that time was that, as soon as the unwashed masses saw that GUIs were going to be the norm on microcomputers, they were well-past-done with anything character based. I don't actually see that as 100% positive progress, though. I see it as emblematic of how "users" see computers, with both good and bad implications. Greater accessibility means more overall benefit to more people, and that's a good thing. However, too much over-simplification leads to a form of learned helplessness and a bigger chasm between the technical, and non-technical users. ... not that M$ didn't simply co-opt the lesson from others who'd been doing it for a very long time. However, it's not such a bad thing to learn You are right, most did prefer it. However, at the time, I remember much wailing and gnashing of teeth as people who had mastered WP screamed at Word for trying to outsmart them and they couldn't simply delete the offending control character to reverse the automagically-helpy "features" they are always trying to shovel into Word/Office. I personally still find Word to be an infuriating abomination no matter how many Paper Clips, ribbon-interfaces, or hollywood-squares-metro GUIs they put on it. A slime mold in a dress is still just a greasy disgusting fungus. Boy did Wordperfect go down in flames quick, though. I won't argue that M$ cleaned their clock in record time. It seemed like in only a couple of years they went from total-domination to being bought by... Corel (?!). Hmm, IMHO, I'd say that it's still pretty equal and if there was any edge, it'd go to EMACS editing mode and keystrokes (especially ctrl-a and ctrl-e). It has a lot to do with what things like libreadline supports by default and what editing mode your shell defaults to. I don't personally like dealing with any kind of termdef/termcap/terminal-control and so I nearly always go looking for someone else's code who's already slogged through editing modes and UTF-8. Well, I do understand were this comes from. UNIX folks were dealing with a sort of multi-culturalism problem. Since it runs on so many hardware platforms and interoperates with tons of terminal types (and DOS or Windows either didn't exist yet, or didn't run on those platforms), folks are (even still) hand-wringing a lot about terminals that have different cursor key mappings et al. That's always the explanation you hear around why VI cursor movement keys aren't (just) arrow keys, and also include 'h', 'j', 'k', and 'l'. So, I don't understand why, after x86 has absolutely dominated the computing scene for a few decades, that there is any excuse left for editors or terminal emulators that screw up the cursor movement keys right outta the box. It's not like there are that many types of keyboard scancodes for cursor keys on PeeCees (and heck, even non-PC UNIX hardware that uses PS/2 or USB keyboards). I don't accept the excuses about 100's of terminal types in the 1980's. That was just too long ago to still be moaning about today. Most of those terminals are in landfills, too. A few hobbyists like me might have some or play with them, but if you are pimping a UNIX variant today and you can't deal (by default out of the box) with cursor keys: your vendor or project needs a reality check. Lame excuses about old terminals making it "hard" are totally worn out and only sound laughable in 2016. However, to be fair, most of those cursor-keys-don't-work issues come from terminal mismatches as folks move between systems on a single terminal session, not ill-maintained PC keyboard + VGA console terminal code. Sounds like you have a much broader experience with word processors than I do, then. I remember some of those, but I wasn't a user of any besides the first two (Wordstar and Wordperfect). -Swift

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

On 9 July 2016 at 05:00, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote: Well yes, OK. But whereas I remember more Word* from the '80s than I do vi, which I have used this year, I remember more CUA keystrokes now than anything else. The lovely Roger Pugh from this very list gave me a BNIB Amstrad PCW9512+ a few years back. (Thanks again, Roger!) I recall him being amazed that, with the thing sitting on my coffee table, not having touched a PCW in 25y, I could remember the key combo to reboot one. :-D Never used an SGI. :-( Well, apart from an x86 Visual Workstation running Windows. Fair enough. For me, that feeling is a CUA editor, from Notepad to Gedit to OS X TextEdit. And that is what I miss at shell level in Linux. I'm a frayed knot. Oh yeah, I've seen such people. My line manager at Red Hat was like that in jEdit. I watched him do stuff I didn't know text editors could do. Note, I don't code any more. So 99% of editor advocacy is irrelevant to me -- I have zero use for syntax highlighting, colouring, formatting, autocomplete, any of it. I write English text, nothing else. This strips away a lot of the discussion, I find. But Silas was writing English text in a code editor, and flipping paragraphs around like a ninja. Astonishing. I've not seen such editor virtuosity since the DOS days of the end-'80s/start-'90s. :-) Yes, I do, and no, I'm not. But I can still boggle Windows users with my ability to control it without a mouse. I learned Windows 2 in a job where we didn't own a PC mouse. We didn't need 'em -- we sold Macs. So I learned all the shortcuts. Many still work. I upgraded the seldom-used Win7 partition on my Thinkpad X200 to Win10 last month. To my surprise, I rather like it. And a lot of the shortcuts /still/ work. I was a support guy for 15-20y, mostly on desktop stuff. I built and installed servers, but customers don't need hands-on help with servers, generally. It's with desktops and laptops. So for me to know all the apps was a professional skill. [Insert "must support all the things" meme] Clunky, but they were a huge help. Menus are /much/ more discoverable than hotkeys. I'm considering building and offering an assortment of DOS VMs for download, because a lot of kids are curious about this stuff but have absolutely no idea how to install and configure any of these apps. Pre-built downloadable DOS VMs with classic apps pre-installed. :-D Actually, I don't remember that! Bit of both? I know nothing of American ISPs or telcos. I didn't even know "Verizon" rhymed with "horizon" until a few years ago. Never seen an ad, never dealt with any of 'em. Europe has its own. Indeed, like for many things, there's the worldwide standard offerings, and then there are the American ones. E.g. I read some good, approachable science stuff about palaeontological climate change yesterday, but it's useless to me because it only uses Fahrenheit. I'm 50 next year. I've /never/ used Fahrenheit. It was already historical when I was at school. I am familiar with inches, feet, yards, miles, but I don't know how many yards are in a mile, and I've never understood ounces & pounds. Metric FTW. Oh yes. I restored a Mac Classic II a few years ago, and ran MacOS 7.6.1 on it -- although this wants a minimum of 12MB and the Classic II maxes out at 10MB (RAMdoubler to the rescue) because at least with 7.6 I can use OpenTransport. ;-) :-D Not seen that, but I remember the first HTML CV and the first Macromedia Flash one. Hmmm. I think -- not sure -- that it was a PowerPC app. Brief info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Macintosh Prebuilt SheepShaver VM here: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/mac-intel.html It's life. Some programs went like that. Sadly the recipe for /commercial/ success is to keep adding features, relying on hardware improvements to keep performance usable, and periodically, change file formats to force customers to upgrade. We all know who has made that work for them. Its "weight" isn't a problem these days. Its bizarre 1970s UI is. Quite. Even on OS X, the FreeBSD-derived ``top'' command doesn't use bold and inverse like the Linux one has for 2 decades. And in terminal windows. Yeah, I've heard it a lot. But I lack the Unix deep knowledge to know. All I see is the surface stuff, the appearance at boot and in a window, the setup program, the options for commands and the helpfulness of the help. Here, Linux still stomps all over FreeBSD, and AIUI FreeBSD is much more modern than the other BSDs. I think I told you that, inspired by your comments, I did get FreeBSD installed and running fine in VirtualBox. It still took literally hours of work and a fair bit of Googling. Ahh, OK, very good point and one I hadn't considered. But OK, while that is legit, would it hurt to have a hotkey or even a readily-accessible option to switch to higher-res text modes, at least? I never found one. Yes, understood, but I'm not even asking for graphics mode, just a hi-res text mode so I can see more of the bootup messages as they scroll past. I know what you mean, though. About 10y back I tried to built a FreeBSD webserver to host my own homepages. For nostalgic reasons, it was a newer motherboard in a cannibalised IBM PC-AT case, with an IBM MDA adaptor and a mono CRT. (I couldn't get it working well enough to use.) Trying to get Debian Linux to boot on that was "interesting". The installer runs in text mode, but during startup, the installer flips into graphics mode to display the spiral Debian logo. If you haven't _got_ graphics, it hangs. Working around _that_ took a _lot_ of work. This is a 100% text-only OS with no GUI at all. Except for the bloody logo. I'd like to slap whoever thought that was a good idea. Around 2012, I tried to put Ubuntu Server on an old Dell Poweredge server a client had given me for free. I put an old mono VGA CRT on it. 640*480 or nothing. Ubuntu Server -- again, a text-only OS -- assumed I'd have _at least_ 800*600 on a VGA console. Just like Debian, it was a real bitch to disable console mode switching. I think I had to build a custom boot CD image! So, incidentally, did Windows Server 2008. That, I got into a half-Nelson. I installed over RDP, installed native graphics chip drivers, then set the monitor type to VGa 640*480 and finally, reluctantly, Windows let me the console. I should look at that, too, I guess. I tried to put NetBSD on my old SPARCstation IPX but I was not 'leet enough to get it working. Yes, GPT does make all this go away, but IMHO it doesn't excuse 25 years of refusing to play nice with the host machine's native formats. (!) Never tried that, either. I confess I had the impression it was moribund. I guess. I've never used most of them. I mostly play with desktop stuff. A friend, and now listmember, had a home Linux server with ZFS for Linux. He raved about it except when he regularly spent 2-3 days hunched over the system console cursing at it when something went wrong. Which puts me /right/ off it, TBH. OK, noted. I am learning that it does get more use than I realised. Oh gods yes. Here in Czechia, there's a strong culture of software piracy. People use low-end kit (including phones) because it's not a rich country, and a lot of people run pirated Windows because it's what they know. Trying to get people to switch from stolen commercial software ($free) to FOSS (Free free, as well as $free) is /tough./ I have a reputation as a Unix/Linux zealot, I think. I'm not. I'm a barely-competent fumbler in my own harsh self-assessment. Always have been. I was a DOS guru, sure, and pretty damned good on Netware, but since then, the tech's moved away. I stopped using Windows early this century, and am now somewhat dated on that, too. I just use Linux because I'm cheap and it's the least-bad option I have. Now I have some money, my desktop's a Mac because it was a cheap used box, with cheap used screens, classic Apple keyboard and cheap Dell 5-button mouse. The apps are all freeware or FOSS. It's just less hassle. But I'm no Unix guru, not really. I still -- heresy ahead! -- prefer MS-DOS COMMAND.COM or NT CMD.EXE to any Unix shell. Yes, really. Really truly. I don't like Unix shells. I don't grok regex or wildcard expansion, I like file extensions, I like DOS wildcards which do predictable things. Shell always feels like it's fighting back, or trying to trick me into doing something massively destructive. I am watching with interest to see what Linux evolves into, the further it moves from its Unix roots. I'm trying to suspend judgement, so long as it still works for me, which thus far it does. Human nature. But also, well, a brief aside: I used to have a lodger in my house who was a real Unix guru. Doctorate in computational modelling of fluid dynamics on grids and clusters, maintainer of the OpenGL bindings for Perl 5. He watched me struggle with Ubuntu and often helped. But eventually, he had an epiphany. He said to me something like "you're not a programmer!" I agreed that no, I wasn't. I was once, on ZX Spectrum and Archimedes, noodling with BASIC. But not on anything modern. The fun has all gone away now. He said, "I've just realised. So much of the stuff I love about Unix and Linux is because it's an OS *by* programmers, *for* programmers. Even the shell is a programming language. It does stuff in odd ways because it makes it easier to script it. And for you, as a non-programmer, who doesn't even write simple scripts any more -- although you can, and you did once, you don't know because you don't need to. So all the stuff that I love about it makes *no sense to you* because you're not a programmer. The wonderful power and flexibility for me and people like me, to you, is just pointless and obstructive. That's why you like Windows. Windows is an OS built for system administrators. Unix is built for programmers. The stuff that is restrictive to me on Windows actually helps you. Being able to 'MOVE *.log OLDLOGS\*.*.old" is more useful to you than all the amazing stuff I can do at a shell prompt because you don't write scripts and you don't need it." It was wonderful watching the light go on over this _very VERY_ smart man's head. But after he realised it, it was like he pitied me a bit. Because I was a blind man blundering around in an art gallery full of beauty that I couldn't appreciate. I don't love Linux, and definitely not Unix. I miss classic MacOS's UI elegance, I miss BeOS's streamlined media-rich multitasking performance, I miss RISC OS's accessibility to a BASIC programmer and its raw grunt, its sheer thin-layer-over-the-metal speed. I miss EPOC's lithe battery-frugal elegance on my Psion PDAs. I miss the vision of Newton OS's amazing UI. I loved all of them. Linux, I just tolerate because it gets the job done easier than Windows and cheaper than a Mac. I don't love it and never did. I don't love Windows. I like to say I hate it, but I don't, I just miss the days when it was small and simple and clean. I didn't love MS-DOS. I made it my slave, I could make it somersault backwards through hoops while whistling the Star-Spangled Banner, but it was always a sad crippled thing. I didn't love OS/2. It was amazing and _so_ much better than Windows 3, but it was a pain in the butt. A horror to install, a nightmare to update, and never very stable or solid. I've never loved any OS on x86 except BeOS. Classic MacOS _looked_ lovely, and it was a joy to use, but like RISC OS, their multitasking and networking both sucked, and they were unstable. Unix is just the least worst option. It's still nasty. As user-friendly as a cornered rat. Go on then. Show me FreeBSD installed with root in a DOS logical drive in an extended partition, with /home in a different logical drive and swap in a third. Go on. I dare you. It can /access/ them but you can't install into them. It tolerates them as second-class citizens for supplemental data storage, no more. Great on a server. Fairly useless on a desktop which may have to multi-boot 3 or 4 OSes. Yeah, I understand your POV, but that's where we part company. Get with the system or GTFO is more my position. :-D That's the EU/US divide, I reckon. Interestingly many of the WPs popular in GB were actually written in the US and sold by American vendors. Let me know if you do! I haven't seen it since about 1992. Not that I miss it. ;-) Heh. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)

On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Liam Proven wrote: AFAIK, original Wordstar didn't, but the Borland IDE and Joe does. Just hold down ctrl and start hitting cursor keys to cover the text you need to select. Badabing. You've got yourself a selection. -Swift

On 07/08/2016 09:20 AM, Swift Griggs wrote: Wordstar allowed for "user routines" for various keyboard and display functions. I suspect you could have made any key or combination of keys do all sorts of strange things. After WS on the PC, I moved to Wordstar 2000. A great product, but utterly incompatible with WordStar (MicroPro provided a "Star Exchange" utility with WS2K to handle conversions). Different key combinations, options, displays entirely. But it did handle prop spacing fonts quite nicely. I still have the instructions from a third-party outfit on how to make WS 3.3 handle prop spacing, but it's a real kludge. Different WP packages had their own peculiar advantages. North Star Memorite, for example, had great footnoting. --Chuck

On 07/08/2016 10:27 AM, Liam Proven wrote: 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... 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. 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. --Chuck

On 07/08/2016 11:19 AM, Liam Proven wrote: Originally, PC-DOS had only EDLIN, which, amazingly, was *less* powerful than CP/M ED. "E" in PC DOS didn't come about until version 6.3 or so. By then, MS had their EDIT editor which was intimately tied into QuickBASIC. Before that, when I typed "E" on my old PC systems, I get the Semware editor--a very nice tool. I purchased it, but rarely used it. Another good DOS editor was VEDIT, which, IIRC, was also offered for the IBM Displaywriter. I still don't like *nix vi to this very day. --Chuck

On 2016-07-08 3:45 PM, Liam Proven wrote: The DOS editor I really like was originally call PE and an enhanced version "E" was shipped with later version of PC-DOS, there are also some clones of the editor floating around as well. I still use this editor regularly because of its very flexible ways of selecting and manipulating text. Paul.

On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Sean Conner wrote: Many early word processing programs were limited to RAM. It was common practice to use a separate file per chapter, sometimes splitting aq chapter into two files. But, a few programs did page in from disk. 'Course with disk(s) of 100K - 250K, you still might need more than one disk for a book.

On 07/08/2016 11:46 AM, Paul Berger wrote: I recall seeing the IBM inkjet printer at a late 70s NCC. IIRC it used electrostatics to deflect the ink drops to their proper position. Another one that pops into my head was CPT, which used a page-edit sort of terminal. The system spewed a page's worth of text to the terminal, which was then edited on the terminal offline. The operator then hit "send" (or some such) to transmit the edited content back to the host. I still have a flipchart reference and a few 8" CPT disks. Some WPs, such as Artec, used a Diablo KSR with a one-line LCD mounted on it and a floor-standing dual 8" drive main unit. IIRC, there was a CRT option available, but it was expensive. Then there were the systems installed in newspaper bullpens--essentially smart terminals hooked to a server. I don't recall the leading brand, but I think Lanier was very big in that area. Initially, I think the biggest advantages of the early wapros was the ability to make edits to existing documents and to create multiple copies of the same document. I wonder how many of the young 'uns here have experienced the joys of carbon paper (especially when accidentally reversed) or having to re-type a whole page of text to make a few simple edits. --Chuck

I saw that technology described in a Dutch magazine ("De Ingenieur" = "the engineer") around 1972 or so. As PB mentioned, it uses a shroud or baffle, since the ink stream is always active; the control voltage steers the drops towards the paper or towards the baffle. Ink hitting the baffle was recirculated, I think. A bit like editing text (programs) on paper tape... I may have missed it, but I haven't seen the IBM MT/ST mentioned. That's certainly a rather old system, dating back to 1964 according to Wikipedia, which says it's the oldest word processor (and references an article about WP history). paul

I can think of any number of reasons. $10k, in 1964? That's half a house. Its user interface may have been ill suited for the job; after all it was designed for business documents. Finally, the tape capacity was 25 kbytes, which is only a few percent of the size of a typical book. Len Deighton was a very successful writer by 1970; he may have decided to spend piles of money on a new tool because he could. But few writers strike it rich; they'd buy a good typewriter because it's a mandatory tool, but few would want to spend more than that. paul

[continued discussion from the URL that Evan posted] On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Paul Koning wrote: I agree that it was hideously expensive, and a writer would have to be wealthy to consider it. In those days, it was common practice for a writer to pay a typist to retype his typed manuscript before submitting it to a publisher. And, if submitting to more than one, MT/ST made multiple typed copies practical, whereas few publishers would bother to read carbon copies. And, as I mentioned previously, it was quite common for secretaries moonlighting as typists to bring work in and use them after-hours. (sometimes with tacit approval from the boss! My boss gave me after-hours access to use 026 punches, ('course I left them cleaner than when I started, with emptied bins, refilled card supply, jams cleared from down punches, etc.)) Admittedly, many typists with access to one would have re-typed later drafts, rather than use the editing capabilities, if there were more than a few changes per paragraph. To a real typist (>100WPM), moving a cursor to position took as long as typing the line. Drafts close to the final one, where entire paragraphs, pages, or even tapes could be left alone would be where it would finally be very worthwhile. Therefore, Deighton's sole claim to fame in this was OWNERSHIP of the MT/ST that his manuscripts were processed on. 25K per tape would mean a box of tapes, but that's not surprising nor daunting. Unlike "modern" wordprocessors which use Megabytes per page, in order to maintain capability of including dancing kangaroos and yodelling jellyfish, that 25K was probably about a dozen pages (per tape). If one or two tapes could be used for each chapter, it would work out great. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 2016-07-08 4:33 PM, Paul Koning wrote: Yes that is correct some of the droplets where purposely steered into the "gutter" and yes it was by electrostatic deflection.. IBM would used the same sort of system in the Item Numbering Feature (INF) on the 3890 cheque sorter to print a number on the back of documents on the fly. This machine could process up to 2400 cheaque sized documents a minute so they are really moving along... print quality was not quite as good. I remember some of the older OP techs talking about the MT/ST, the tape reader was entirely electro-mechanical and read in stripes across the tape. This would be a precursor of the Magcard Selectric and the Memory typewriter. The later had a wide loop of tape inside an enlarged selectric case for storage. Paul.

I liked EPM under OS/2, and had to get acquainted with TEDIT for disaster recovery of same. I believe "E" under OS/2 was just a stripped-down GUI editor akin to MS Notepad.

It was thus said that the Great Chuck Guzis once stated: I've come to the conclusion [1] that terminfo and curses aren't needed any more. If you target VT100 (or Xterm or any other derivative) and directly write ANSI sequences, it'll just work. It's a few lines of code to get the current TTY (on any modern Unix system) into raw mode in order to read characters [2]. -spc (Of course, then you have to deal with escape sequences, which can get messy ... ) [1] Bias most likely from my own usage. Mileage may vary here on this list where all sorts of odd-ball systems are still in use 8-P [2] It's six lines to get an open TTY into raw mode, one line to restore upon exit. Add in a few more lines to handle SIGWINCH (window resize). *Much* easier than dealing with curses.

It was thus said that the Great Mouse once stated: I did acknowledge (but it was snipped in your reply---it's the missing footnote). Again, it's been easily fifteen years since I last used a physical terminal, and even then, back around 2000, I only knew one other person (in person) that owned a physical terminal like I did. Today? Any terms I use (and I think the most users *NOT ON THIS LIST*) use are xterms or derivatives of xterm. I've also checked the xterm use of DCS. I *still* don't understand where you would use those particular sequences. I've also come across plenty of libraries and modules (for various langauges) that use raw ANSI sequences to color things when they "technically" should be using the Termcap Sf and Sb capabilities---those scuflaws! Touting non-portable behavior like that! If I found that in any code I had to maintain, I'd reject that line as the unmaintainable mess that it is. Personally, I use: struct termios old; struct termios raw; int fh; fh = open("/dev/tty",O_RDWR); tcgetattr(fh,&old); raw = old; cfmakeraw(&raw); raw.c_cc[VMIN] = 1; raw.c_cc[VTIME] = 1; tcsetattr(fh,TCSANOW,&raw); (I didn't include variable declarations or obtaining the file handle to the TTY device in my initial message). -spc (Fraktur? Really? Fraktur? What company had enough blackmail material to get Fraktur part of the ECMA-48 standard?)