OT:Scripsit (was Re: OT - FpWord)

[Tom Podnar]

Scripsit was a GREAT program. Much better than WP for Unix ever was. John poured his heart and soul into it; but he didn't have what WordPerect poured into it which was gobs of marketing money for an inferior product.

Alas, I don't see my Scripsit binder on the shelf anymore, although I do have two big giant filePro 16 binders and another that just says "filePro" with a 4.0 manual inside.

If I boot my old SCO 3.2v4.2 server, I can probably still run Scripsit. That machine still runs, but whines and doesn't get turned on very often. Pentium 90 with a 2GB hard drive.

Tom Podnar
Microlite / SCO Cloud

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Campbell" <bill at celestial.com>
To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2013 4:53:27 PM
Subject: Re: OT:Scripsit (was Re: OT - FpWord)

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013, Kenneth Brody wrote:
>On 3/26/2013 3:15 PM, Harold Faulkner wrote:
>[...]
>> I remember that in the 80's John acquired from tandy the right to sell,
>> and probably modify Radio Shack's word processor called Scripsit.
>> Scripsit probably wouldn't work on a DOS computer, but maybe John
>> modified Scripsit so it would work on DOS computers.
>[...]
>
>I believe that John Esak has stated in the past that he had no intention of 
>porting Scripsit to DOS/Windows/Linux/whatever, nor releasing the source 
>code.  Why, I don't know, but that's his stand.  Whether that's changed over 
>the years, you would have to ask him yourself.

John and I talked about this years ago after I wrote my scr2wp program that
converted Scripsit for Xenix systems to WordPerfect 4.2.  I did that
conversion program by looking at lots of Scripsit binary files, and
creating various Scripsit documents to see how they were handled without
source code or any help from John.

As I remember, the economics just didn't work out as there wouldn't be
enough sales to justify the cost.  This makes sense to me as I sold a fair
number of scr2wp programs over the years, including one within the last 5
years that came in out of the blue.  My only hope for another sale would be
if Joel Howell ever decides to move up from the Tandy 6000 he's still
running as of an email I got from him this month.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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