🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2018-03-24 13:30, J. Clarke wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Mar 2018 08:14:19 +0100, "Carlos E.R."
> <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> On 2018-03-24 01:36, J. Clarke wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> Are you sure you used those on an original IBM PC at 4Mhz?
>> I think they appeared much later.
> 
> Yes, I am sure.
> 
> Multimate shipped in 1982--it was developed under a contract from
> Connecticut Mutual however the contract allowed the developer to
> market the product to others.  The first time I encountered it it was
> running on an IBM PC--I remember that it was a PC and not even an XT
> because we had to boot from a diskette in order to access the hard
> disk and I later upgraded one of the machines to a 286 motherboard
> that was unique because it supported the 5-slot PC case.  Note that
> the upgrade was to get quicker response time for flight mechanics
> calculations, not because there was any issue with the word
> processing.
> 
> When we got our first laser printer, Multimate was slow to support it,
> so we went to Wordstar on those same machines, and it was godawful
> slow--we replaced it with Word which had full support for that printer
> and worked fine.  That would have been in 1983 or 1984.
> 
> A friend of mine ran a rent-an-office service providing typing and
> answering services.  I supported her systems, which were IBM PCs
> networked to a Novell server running on an XT.  She was using Word
> Perfect, which was developed in 1979 to run on a Data General computer
> and was ported to the PC in 1982.  She was very happy with it.
> 
> All of these released _before_ the AT.
> 
> I don't know why you think that word processing needs any great deal
> of computer power--Wordstar ran fine on my 8-bit CP/M machine, better
> than it did on the PC.

I have no issue with Wordstar, I used it at the time on my Amstrad 1512,
but I don't remember Word nor WordPerfect. Maybe they simply were not
popular here: I started using WP with version 5 around 1990.

I think I remember trying other word processors and dropping them at the
time, not up to the task. They could perhaps be early versions of Word
or WP.

-- 
Cheers, Carlos.