🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7776pf$jbo$1...@news.seed.net.tw>,
Dan Strychalski  <dski@cameonet.cameo.com.twx> wrote:

>Remember that every serious general-purpose system *must* have a Ctrl
>key (even the Mac eventually got it), and that before 1986 Ctrl was
>almost universally in the home row, immediately to the left of the A
>key, the position preferred by most (*most*, I said) people who know a
>thing or two about computers and must use the keyboard a great deal.

yes, exactly where God intended it to be.

>Since Z, X, and C are all in the bottom row (in QWERTY), Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-X,
>and Ctrl-C, when used without a prefix keystroke in WordStar, move the
>viewframe or the cursor down (all motion control is on the left hand).
>Ctrl-V, being in the relatively awkward area between a touch typist's
>hands, is assigned to the little-used insert/overtype toggle (and V can
>be taken to represent "oVertype"). In blocK operations (which all have
>Ctrl-K as a lead-in, and which include so-called cut-and-paste
>functions), there is indeed a superficial similarity to the Mac
>conventions: Ctrl-Kc copies, and Ctrl-Kv moVes, a marked block to the
>current cursor position. Ctrl-Kx, however, is "save and exit with no
>questions asked"

As I recall, there was no "clipboard" type operation; the text had to
remain existing int the document until moved or copied.

>(This had the added benefit of ensuring that people would detest using
>the keyboard and be ripe for Windows. I know a whole lotta people who
>love, and I mean l-o-v-e LOVE WordStar, vi, or Emacs keystrokes and can
>use them for everything all day every day. When was the last time you
>heard anyone rave about WordPerfect, Word for MS/PC DOS, or MultiMate
>[or, for that matter, Macintosh, or Windows, or CUA] command keystrokes?
>Considering how many more people have used these programs by now, isn't
>that just a little bit strange?)

And with those evil keyboads with the control-key-in-exile, several
days of heavy emacs work sent me to a physician to check out the strain.
But now I have three genuine AT keyboards.  One has a sticky R, 
another a sticky tab, and the third i haven't tried (it's filthy, but
at $1/pop . . .).  So I have to drop them on the desk twice a day;
they have a good, stiff, response :)

>By the end of the eighties, CP/M was out of contention, 

Wait a minute, wasn't this DR-DOS's heyday?  I recall it peaking at
about 10% market share, right until those mysterious windows crashes
& funny "every unit you ship, regardless of using msdos" licensing
terms.  

For those that don't recall, CP/M became CP/M-86 which spun off 
Concurrent CP/M which i observed multitasking in 1984 on an 8086,
which became Concurrent Dos, or CDOS.  I forget whether CP/M-86 
or CDOS became DR-DOS, which became Novel Dos, which became Caldera 
Dos, which became DR-DOS, which premptively multitasks, unlike a 
certain popular system. If they weren't descended from CDOS, I 
don't know when they started multitasking, and I also don't know 
when it became concurrent.  But I do know that in 1984 I had an
8mhz 8086 with 640K and no hard disk running word star, pip, and 
something else simultaneously.


-- 
These opinions will not be those of ISU until it pays my retainer.