Re: Old word processors

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#621448

From: Dave Garland
Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2018 18:24

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On 3/18/2018 8:51 AM, Kerr-Mudd,John wrote:

> At a PPOE the secretaries had to use PC's with DisplayWrite (I,II, 3, 4 )
> It was 'oribble to a simple programmer like me, used to a program editor.
> Text saved in EBCDIC. The only feature that appealed was "cursor-draw".
> 
The DisplayWriter was a fine WP station. It had a Selectric-quality 
keyboard, a good (albeit monochrome and character) display, and could 
keep up with the fastest typist. There obviously wasn't any 
"cursor-draw", since there was no mouse, but a typist doesn't need 
that anyhow. The software was solid, saving was pretty much automatic, 
and I don't think I ever saw a D'wr crash.

DisplayWrite was their attempt to recreate that experience for a PC. 
It was pretty klunky, and having what was usually a crappy keyboard 
and a monochrome monitor (CGA for WP would rot your eyeballs out) that 
couldn't handle the symbol characters didn't help. IBM obviously 
didn't know what to do when they no longer had control over the 
hardware. WordPerfect did things much better (aside from the tendency 
to assign functions to F, shift-F, ^F, and alt-F keys in what seemed 
to be random order).

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From: Dave Garland <dave.g...@wizinfo.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: Old word processors
Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2018 13:24:42 -0500
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