🚀 go-pugleaf

On 3/23/2018 2:36 PM, hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
> On Sunday, March 18, 2018 at 2:24:46 PM UTC-4, Dave Garland wrote:
> 
>> 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).
> 
> IBM had multiple word processing products, and there were
> many others, too.
> 
> We used IBM's Assistant Series.  I don't think they were as popular,
> but IMHO they were very good.  "Writing Assistant" was a powerful
> but easy to use tool.

Writing Assistant was pretty clearly a rebadged version of pfs:Write. 
There was a suite of pfs: products, and I think that the other 
"Assistant" programs were also versions of those, not written by IBM.

> 
> IMHO, the original IBM PC was too underpowered to properly support
> word processing, or indeed, much else.  The 286 onward was a lot
> faster and thus easier to use.  A lot of early programs obviously
> worked on the original PC, even with just floppies, but they ran
> slowly.

Underpowered? Perhaps if you insist on WYSIWYG, but I don't think 
anything common did that at the time. I felt the original IBM-PC was 
slow and klunky compared to a decent CP/M machine, though it did have 
a very nice ("IBM quality") keyboard. I was a 100wpm typist, and could 
do that on a Morrow MD-3 (CP/M, 4MHz Z80) with an LSI ADM-20 (? badged 
Morrow) terminal and WordStar. Or a Leading Edge Model D (PC clone 
with a HDD, nice). Don't remember what the WP software there was, but 
I mostly ran Quattro Pro on that machine. Couldn't type that fast on 
an Osborne, that keyboard was too crappy, though I did know a few 
people in nonprofits who used them to do grant proposals and such (the 
eyestrain must have been severe).