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#31 | ||
the rook, bossing Never.
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Windows in reality to be stable with reasonable performance wasn't very good or useful till about 1993 (NT 3.1 came out then, but I didn't have NT till late 1994) with Win 3.1 / Win3.11 /WFWG 3.1x, a 386 minimum, VGA minimum, 32 bit disc drivers, 32 bit TCP/IP, sound blaster, 40 Mbyte HDD (20 Mbyte was common but too small) and CD-ROM drive. I forget but probably 4 M RAM. Actually NT 3.51 (after Win 95) ran well enough on any decent spec computer for Win95 and even had an an Explorer Shell preview just before NT 4.0. The most damaging thing for IT, businesses, and security was Win95 for business, rather than being sold as a game console. Set back security etc ten years+. We had NT 3.51 on an old AST 386 with 3 off ISA Memory cards for 6 Mbyte RAM instead of 640K! That was our first "real" server at home and the LAN was "cheaper-net" coax. Later Wingate for shared dialup 33K and replaced in late 1990s with 128 k ISDN. Then we moved out of town in autumn 1998 and had only 19K dialup. We had one Win95 (later Win98) for games for kids and stayed with WFWG 3.11 and Win32s till we got NT 4.0 on workstations. Windows 1.x, 2.x 286 and 386 were less use than GEM. Win 3.0 on a 286 was barely functional. So MS actually was selling Excel and Word on Mac before Windows. Word 2.0a for Windows on Win 3.1 on a 386 is thus really the earliest decent version and when Wordperfect rapidly declined. Wordstar was down to niche sales in UK & Ireland even before Windows and probably before WS 7.0 Well, this is a thread about Wordstar, already very niche 30 years ago, so some nostalgia is in order. Last edited by Quoth; 08-12-2024 at 02:46 AM. |
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#32 |
Addict
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When P. Khan would show up at the Houston computer club there would be literally ten thousand people in Honolulu shirts waiting to cheer him on for the release of his latest and greatest. A uniformed high school band he hired would proceed him as he entered the auditorium flinging floppy discs like frisbees of his prerelease around the room. Borland's idea was to include a selectable menu structure at the top of each of his programs to emulate the menu structure of all popular programs or, alternately, you could roll your own. If you liked Lotus 123, his Quattro Pro had those drop downs. If you liked Word perfect, Word, Worstar his wordprocessor had those drop downs. Same for database, etc. He got sued by Microsoft for copyright and had to leave off their menus, but there was a menu-maker, so, with some labor you could still make recreate what you were used to. Khan made the very first phone camera when his kid got born. He was reportedly not into ruthlessness and got sidelined by Microsoft. At one time I would have thought that Borland would eclipse Microsoft.
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#33 | |
the rook, bossing Never.
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and https://www.theregister.com/2012/01/..._of_khan_2011/ Ah, Verity Stob. I think a fan of Delphi / Borland Pascal. |
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#34 |
eReader Wrangler
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That's what I was wondering.
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#35 | ||
eReader Wrangler
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I can't remember when I started using Windows 98 (or maybe XP), but I was using XP when I went to Linux in about 2007. (I had been trying out Linux for several years before finally moving over to it.) WordPerfect was pretty big in Idaho in the early 90s, I think partly because it was big in Utah — to some it was associated with support for the Mormon church (LDS). I didn't try it out until much later (when it became cheap to buy a used copy on eBay). Never used it much. I think I still have the disks and manual in storage but I doubt I'll ever use it again. Even after I owned a PC, I still did a lot of computing on a Sinclair QL, which came with a pretty good word processor called Quill. That was my first real word processor. Again I'm rambling. Sorry. |
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#36 |
the rook, bossing Never.
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#37 |
eReader Wrangler
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#38 |
Wizard
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Since we're going down memory lane...
I jumped on Windows NT as soon as it became available and avoided all that Windows 95 nonsense. What a dead end. In the last decade I have written numerical routines in assembler. Some things like 24 bit fixed point are not easily implemented in higher languages. C to assembly is not that inefficient with a decent compiler. OTOH, just look through any C++ program and look at all the extra instructions. I was looking for an ioctl and couldn't believe that there was no 0xc138fd09. I knew that high and low were split, but I wasn't expecting this! ![]() Code:
129788: 529fa0c8 mov w8, #0xfd06 12978c: 72b82708 movk w8, #0xc138, lsl #16 129790: 11000d01 add w1, w8, #0x3 |
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#39 | |
the rook, bossing Never.
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Then used techniques from a PC graphics text book to turn floating point program to fixed point and use the Integer library I wrote with pretending it's fixed point. Look up tables for trig functions storing only 1/4 of 360 degrees. Log tables and interpolation can also be used on simple CPUS with only add but plenty of ROM/EPROM/Flash. Yes, there are always specialist situations where a compiler doesn't support it, or a particular cpu architecture or instruction set is an issue. I can't think of a situation where an entire program needs to be in assembler. JAL allows inline assembler and most compilers will allow interface to a separately built function in assembler, or on Windows a DLL at run time, though using a DLL you wrote in C/Modula-2/C++ in VB6, is fraught. VB currency type allowed bigger integers and you had to assign a VB string to a constant (literal string) before passing as VB strings are dynamic. It was enjoyable at the time but I don't miss it. I've reverse engineered x86 binary to assembler to figure out what magic was being done to a VGA card by a DOS program. Also if you are writing a compiler or new language at first stage you might do a pre-processor (translator) that emits C, then compile the compiler with that. Then use that compiler to compile the compiler again to get a version without C idiosyncrasies. You might look at the assembler. Then you might improve the compiler. Rinse and repeat. |
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#40 | |
Somewhat clueless
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Modern, high-quality C compilers are usually at least as good as expert programmers at optimisation, and often better. Use assembler when you need to know exactly what's happening at the hardware level, but otherwise use the compiler and associated optimisation tools, check the generated assembly for obvious mistakes, and spend your time on algorithmic optimisation rather than instruction-level tweaking. Fundamentally, it comes down to that if you know something the compiler doesn't, code it in assembler. Otherwise, let it do its job. |
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#41 |
Wizard
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#42 |
eReader Wrangler
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I've been experimenting with WordStar (versions 4, 5, 5.5, 6 and 7) using DosBox and found that, with the "Convert" program (Star Exchange), you can convert your WordStar files into RTF format and they retain that WordStar formatting when opened in LibreOffice. From there you can do anything, print or save to PDF. It looks like Mr. Sawyer has Star Exchange set to RTF by default, so I'm guessing he does that specifically for this reason. (I haven't yet gone through all the files he includes in his WordStar archive — he's done a lot of work with this.)
I still like WordStar for DOS and this makes it even more useful for me. |
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#43 | |
Bibliophagist
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I take it that you agree that Norton Commander does not have a word processor component. |
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