Article View: alt.folklore.computers
Article #621452Re: Old word processors
From: Dave Garland
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2018 00:45
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2018 00:45
35 lines
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3637 bytes
On 3/19/2018 2:41 PM, Charles Richmond wrote: > On 3/19/2018 12:46 PM, Dave Garland wrote: >> On 3/19/2018 10:09 AM, Carlos E.R. wrote: >> >>> WordStar on the other hand was designed for touch typists. But they >>> undid that when they designed new versions with different keys >>> (wordstar >>> 2000?) >>> >> I personally thought WordStar 4 was the acme of perfection for PCs, >> though the Displaywriter was better. WordPerfect was very popular >> with business in the US, in part due to their exceptionally good >> telephone support and aftermarket add-ons for the medical and legal >> professions. The F-key orientaton slowed me down, but I never used >> it for production typing. In the Windows era all of them >> deteriorated, and required taking your hand off the keyboard to >> (which slows touch typists down a lot, and occasionally resulted in >> entire paragraphs of gibberish due to their hand ending up one key >> off of where it should be) to use the mouse. I think that the people >> who marketed and wrote software were hunt-and-peck typists, and >> probably correctly assumed that the people who purchased the >> software were as well. The people who had to use it, not so much, >> back then. >> > > Once there was a "rumor" that the company that owned WordPerfect... > actually *lost* the source code for it!!! The whole source code for > the program had to bw re-written. > I don't know about that, but they did not make the jump to Windows any better than WordStar did (for one thing, Windows monopolized some of the function keys). And then the company was sold to Novell. Microsoft may have played some of their notorious tricks to break it since MS had a competing product (Word). And it was all pretty much downhill, ending up being owned by Corel.
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X-Received: by 10.28.126.148 with SMTP id z142mr76431wmc.30.1521506754054; Mon, 19 Mar 2018 17:45:54 -0700 (PDT) X-BeenThere: alt.folklore.computers@googlegroups.com Received: by 10.28.133.206 with SMTP id h197ls21695wmd.1.canary-gmail; Mon, 19 Mar 2018 17:45:53 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 10.28.51.133 with SMTP id z127mr82240wmz.0.1521506753151; Mon, 19 Mar 2018 17:45:53 -0700 (PDT) Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!n24ni37658wmi.0!nntp.google.com!proxad.net!feeder1-2.proxad.net!feeder.erje.net!2.eu.feeder.erje.net!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Dave Garland <dave.g...@wizinfo.com> Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: Old word processors Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2018 19:45:51 -0500 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 35 Message-ID: <p8plk0$9d6$1@dont-email.me> References: <87k1ub4vgf.fsf@usenet.ankman.de> <396ec331-b5a3-4137-ac0f-c45471afccb7@googlegroups.com> <87fu4y4d8m.fsf@usenet.ankman.de> <p8l274$r1u$1@dont-email.me> <XnsA8A98D082B822admin127001@85.214.115.223> <p8matd$94n$1@dont-email.me> <3e05oe-6jb.ln1@Telcontar.valinor> <p8ot29$q5b$1@dont-email.me> <p8p3q6$f9q$1@dont-email.me> Mime-Version: 1.0 Injection-Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2018 00:45:53 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: reader02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="431a2dad6b5abb735227490f6521ae52"; logging-data="9638"; mail-complaints-to="ab...@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19aLRBLhxyeabxCorWpyVSm/Sz+AM8ojKs=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.6.0 In-Reply-To: <p8p3q6$f9q$1@dont-email.me> Cancel-Lock: sha1:iSbSzIfcaLj091LdnfOfjII/qOY= X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit