One of our members and WordStar

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by rcentros

Hope everything is okay there. I wish we could get a little rain here in Idaho. We've had a wet spring but a dry summer (so far).

All OK, except the battery in one UPS is obviously now junk. Wife on her laptop was OK because the UPS for fibre, router, DECT phone, wifi & switch was OK.

Originally Posted by rcentros

I never liked WordPerfect (even though it was "slicker" than WordStar) because I didn't like moving off the "home keys" to the Function keys. I mostly use Jstar for writing now, but I do have WordStar (5, 5.5, and VDE in DOSBox-X). At one point I also owned earlier versions of WordStar for CP/M (I owned a couple Kaypros for a while), WordStar 2000 and WordStar 6, (bought cheap off eBay). I don't know why I don't have WordStar 6 in DosBox-X, I guess I should add it. (I actually still like 5 best, because that's the one I started with.)

I didn't find Wordperfect "slicker", just different. I preferred WS because I was used to it and it was also on CP/M. I had to use WP to teach wordprocessing, but didn't use it at home. By then almost no-one was using WP either (1992 or 1993?), which some years before had replaced WS in most businesses. In 1991 MS Word for DOS was certainly slicker and seemed common in Shannon Industrial Estate, but I was using NewWord, the Wordstar clone.

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.

[rjwse@aol.com]

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.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by rjwse@aol.com

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.

…

He was reportedly not into ruthlessness and got sidelined by Microsoft. At one time I would have thought that Borland would eclipse Microsoft.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/08/...ahn_apocrypha/
and
https://www.theregister.com/2012/01/..._of_khan_2011/

Ah, Verity Stob. I think a fan of Delphi / Borland Pascal.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

What could it do that Norton Commander couldn't?

Originally Posted by DNSB

What the expletive deleted does a text-based user interface for managing files running on top of DOS have to do with using WordStar? Did Norton Commander include a word processor?

That's what I was wondering.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by Quoth

All OK, except the battery in one UPS is obviously now junk. Wife on her laptop was OK because the UPS for fibre, router, DECT phone, wifi & switch was OK.

Sorry to hear that (the UPS battery part).

Originally Posted by Quoth

I didn't find Wordperfect "slicker", just different. I preferred WS because I was used to it and it was also on CP/M. I had to use WP to teach wordprocessing, but didn't use it at home. By then almost no-one was using WP either (1992 or 1993?), which some years before had replaced WS in most businesses. In 1991 MS Word for DOS was certainly slicker and seemed common in Shannon Industrial Estate, but I was using NewWord, the Wordstar clone.

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.

Agreed on the nostalgia. I basically skipped Windows 95. I was using OS/2 and stuck with its included Windows 3.11. (But all word processing was done with WordStar in DOS, which also ran fine in OS/2.)

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.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by rcentros

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.

Shame about the "stringy drives" on the QL. A friend had a QL.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Shame about the "stringy drives" on the QL. A friend had a QL.

They worked okay for me. But I added extra memory and a disk drive interface to mine. So most of what I did was done on floppy drives after that.

[Renate]

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!

  129788:	529fa0c8 	mov	w8, #0xfd06
  12978c:	72b82708 	movk	w8, #0xc138, lsl #16
  129790:	11000d01 	add	w1, w8, #0x3

Assembly is still very important for reverse engineering.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Renate

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.

That's a good example, as is any fixed point arithmetic not using 8, 16, 32 or 64 bits on mainstream compilers/CPUs. I did a maths library for an NEC microcontroller that only had an add instruction. Complement to subtract, but division is to be avoided, so some constants stored a 1/x, But for 16F/18F PIC I used JAL to write my maths library as it was 8 & 16 bit.
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.

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I can't think of a situation where an entire program needs to be in assembler.

Agreed.

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.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Did Norton Commander include a word processor?

It included plain text viewer (F3) and plain text editor (F4).
Just like Midnight Commander today or TotalCommander or Krusader.

[rcentros]

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.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by kacir

It included plain text viewer (F3) and plain text editor (F4).
Just like Midnight Commander today or TotalCommander or Krusader.

The post I was quoted was this one in reference to WordStar:

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

What could it do that Norton Commander couldn't?

I take it that you agree that Norton Commander does not have a word processor component.

[jbjb]

Apologies for reawakening the thread, but does anyone else remember Lotus Manuscript? That was always my favourite from that era - no WYSISWYG, but the separation of content and formatting was ahead of its time IMHO.

[PeterT]

I remember using an IBM product called DCF back in the mid '70s. Your document was marked up with GML tags and then when processed it would create output tailored to the output device.