🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2018-03-19 18:46, 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.

Wordperfect 5.x was wonderful. It was the first one I had that handled 9
pin printers perfectly. The page size was correctly calculated even if
it contained photos or images. It had a mode to display what would be
the result graphically. This rendering was not specially fast. All the
wordstar variants I used previously made errors.

Later I had to use Windows based word processors. I remember one, what
was it... Abipro? amiword? Amipro?  The last one does exist in the
wikipedia. I don't remember. But all the windows based wordprocessors I
tried (except WP) were terrible with pin printers, minutes per page,
because they printed graphics instead of letters.

But the Windows Word Perfect was not good enough, they did not design it
well. It was slow, it crashed, it failed, different interface IIRC...

There was a MsDOS word processor that was intended to write math texts
properly. I don't remember the name, but I found it difficult to use. A
friend of mine used it a lot, said it was the only choice for math. Now
he uses Tex.

-- 
Cheers, Carlos.