Slightly OT for those of us who started on Tandy Hardware

[Bruce Easton]

I use LibreOffice now as well on mac because Word on mac just won't 
export a tab-delimited file correctly for Linux - at least not easily.

I assisted a business English teacher at a secretarial school for a 
while back in the days of WordStar.  One of my tasks was keeping the 
various software up to date. Students were required to produce documents 
from WordStar as well as from the dedicated DisplayWrite machines.   
(The DW machines there were the models that had portrait monitors.)  
There was also a dedicated Wang machine that sat in the corner that no 
one used.


On 9/17/19 7:57 PM, Bill Campbell via Filepro-list wrote:
> 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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