Slightly OT for those of us who started on Tandy Hardware

[Richard Kreiss]

My daughter's first word processor was Scripsit on my Tandy 16 running Xenix.  She had a terminal in her room.  That must have been in the early 80's as she was in 8th grade (1983).  

She was way ahead of her teachers and classmates when it came to using a computer.

They were teaching BASIC at the time and spent 5 weeks teaching if, when programming.
 I taught her and a number of her friends this in about an hour.  The class was still learning the basics of if/when programming and not any real programming.

I felt that teaching program was a complete waste of time as computer users would be able to purchase the programs they needed and not have to write them from scratch.  There were students who were writing and selling games who had a better knowledge of programming then the teachers.

I am not sure what they are teaching now. I hope it has something to do with security. The problem is that many school districts are using Apple computers (donated by Apple) and not machines used by businesses i.e. *nix or Windows based computers.  Yes, there are a few business which are on Apple products but not many.


Richard Kreiss
GCC Consulting



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Filepro-list <filepro-list-bounces+rkreiss=verizon.net at lists.celestial.com>
> On Behalf Of Bill Campbell via Filepro-list
> Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2019 7:57 PM
> To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
> Subject: Re: Slightly OT for those of us who started on Tandy Hardware
> 
> 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
> --
> INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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