FW: PLUG: OT: AD\/:ETC - Good training for mouse-challenged *nixpeople

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2005, Fairlight wrote:
>Simon--er, no...it was John Esak--said:
>> 
>> I learned Scripsit that way, too!
>> Man I hate to reminisce, but those were the good old days.
>
>I'm confused.  (No comments, people!)  I thought you -wrote- Scripsit???
>You joking about how you learned it, or is there something I'm missing
>about this?

The first versions of Scripsit that John and I used was on TRSDOS
on the Radio Shack Model IIs.  I was managing a Radio Shack ``X''
department in D.C. at 19th and K streets while John was a CMR at
the Radio Shack Computer Center a couple of blocks away at 18th
and M streets.

Scripsit for the Model 16/6000 Xenix machines was a very
different beast than the TRSDOS version, and, IHMO, not as easy
to use since it had to run on dumb terminals as opposed to a
single user machine with memory mapped video and no issues with
serial communications (it used ctrl-s for something which would
stop a serial line dead in its tracks :-).

I don't know the details, but as I understand it, John did a deal
with Tandy to port the *nix version of Scripsit to the NCR Unix.

My most technical contribution to the Scripsit world was to write
a program that converted Xenix Scripsit files to WordPerfect 4.2
since most law offices in the late '80s preferred WP (I have a
close friend who is an excellent legal typist who claims that her
efficieny dropped at least 50% when she had to use Word for
Windows compared to WP for DOS :-).  When I wrote scr2wp, I had
no documentation on the Scripsit formats, and had to figure them
out by creating documents, and looking at the binary files.

Bill
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