Slightly OT for those of us who started on Tandy Hardware

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Sep 17, 2019, Fairlight via Filepro-list wrote:

>WordStar was a minor nightmare.  It's the only editor I can think of that
>used more control keys than EMACS.  :)

>I knew how to use all of them at one point.  If there was a word processor
>on the market, I was trained on it.  Even Word/36 on System/36, and that's
>really bloody obscure (and yet, I had a gig doing just that for a while).

I never used WordStar, but then I never ran a CP/M machine either.

The only word processor I knew well was Scripsit, mostly because
I had to demonstrate it to potential customers.  I use LibreOffice
now, but don't consider myself really proficient with it.  Most
of the documentaton I've written as been written in the vi editor
for groff or Docbook.  I'm answering this message in mutt with vi.

I've been using vi since 1982 or so, and it's second nature to my
fingers.  I write a lot of python scripts, and my code would
drive a Pythonista nuts as I use commented curly braces around
blocks of code so I can use the vi '%' key to find matching
braces.

>Those days are gone.  Use it or lose it, and I haven't needed anything like
>that in years.

>But yeah, WordStar was...  I don't know many who -liked- WordStar.  It
>wasn't as bad as some made out, but it was needlessly taxing on the human
>memory.  EMACS is much the same, although I liked EMACS a lot when I was
>using it.  My CLI is still EMACS bindings; I'll willingly use a modal CLI
>over my dead body.

...

Bill
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