Article View: alt.folklore.computers
Article #621466Re: Old word processors
From: J. Clarke
Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2018 00:36
Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2018 00:36
29 lines
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2792 bytes
On Fri, 23 Mar 2018 12:36:27 -0700 (PDT), 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. > >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. The machine was not too slow. It worked fine with Word Perfect, Multimate, and Word. It didn't work very well with Wordstar because the developers did a half-assed job of porting it.
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X-Received: by 10.107.3.79 with SMTP id 76mr10230303iod.134.1521851813368; Fri, 23 Mar 2018 17:36:53 -0700 (PDT) X-BeenThere: alt.folklore.computers@googlegroups.com Received: by 10.107.80.10 with SMTP id e10ls2251755iob.10.gmail; Fri, 23 Mar 2018 17:36:52 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 10.107.57.4 with SMTP id g4mr13965927ioa.18.1521851812421; Fri, 23 Mar 2018 17:36:52 -0700 (PDT) Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!d3-v6ni1125itf.0!nntp.google.com!peer02.iad!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!post02.iad!fx02.iad.POSTED!not-for-mail From: J. Clarke <jclarke...@gmail.com> Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: Old word processors Message-ID: <797bbd92d9i308or8op7ig56h12t7499lt@4ax.com> 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> <eff02c9e-2715-42e2-bca8-b3165b0b6426@googlegroups.com> User-Agent: ForteAgent/8.00.32.1272 MIME-Version: 1.0 Lines: 31 X-Complaints-To: ab...@newsdemon.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2018 00:36:51 UTC Organization: http://www.NewsDemon.com Bytes: 2192 Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2018 20:36:50 -0400 X-Received-Bytes: 2254 X-Received-Body-CRC: 3292882547 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit