• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

25 years of MS Word

You can? A quick disassemble of "chuckguzis" shows some garbage :)

Oh c'mon, haven't you ever used TECO? A favorite game of TECO-ers was to type in some phrase or name to see what happened (every character is a command in TECO).

Most often, it seems that you'd end up with a deleted buffer. :( TECO is good for hours of fun writing arcane sequences that do strange things.

Emacs started as a bunch of TECO macros.
 
Someplace on one of my computer HDs , I have a diatribe against the use of "Word" which was entitled "Microsoft Word is Not a Text Transfer Program". As a matter of course I would send it to offices of the provincal government who, using their newest "Office" installed computers would send me messages encoded in this proprietary format. Some of my protests even elicited messages of agreement. My main computer did not have MS$ "Word" installed, altho on one of my boxes, I will admit now, I did have Word 1 in both English and French. I also have "Word Viewer" on several machines for self-defense.

Much of my opposition was based on not having MS$ controlling transfer of text messages.

I had no fondness for the formerly Mormon-controlled WP and it's similarly controlled architecture, nor Wordstar's intricacies or Lotus AMI's walk-the-middle-ground. Notepad or Write served my needs without embellished formattng. My 2-fingered style of typing worked fine wth them. There are DTP programs should I want to go "fancy".

So now, MS$ having eviscerated "Write", I retain a healthy oppostion to "Word" and can only wish this was some sort of anniversary of it's death as a program, clearing the way for the many superior wordpackaging programs around, which are more or less Free.

Lawrence
 
Last edited:
You must be joking!!! I'm not laughing!

I remember having to do computer science projects using VI editor. Painful experience. Some people thought it was the shiznit.

It is the shiznit! I use vi every day in the real world (middle-ware sys admin for a large U.S. bank), we have hundreds of Sun servers in datacenters across the country, and vi is all they have! :D
 
Someplace on one of my computer HDs , I have a diatribe against the use of "Word" which was entitled "Microsoft Word is Not a Text Transfer Program". As a matter of course I would send it to offices of the provincal government who, using their newest "Office" installed computers would send me messages encoded in this proprietary format. Some of my protests even elicited messages of agreement. My main computer did not have MS$ "Word" installed, altho on one of my boxes, I will admit now, I did have Word 1 in both English and French. I also have "Word Viewer" on several machines for self-defense.

Much of my opposition was based on not having MS$ controlling transfer of text messages.

I had no fondness for the formerly Mormon-controlled WP and it's similarly controlled architecture, nor Wordstar's intricacies or Lotus AMI's walk-the-middle-ground. Notepad or Write served my needs without embellished formattng. My 2-fingered style of typing worked fine wth them. There are DTP programs should I want to go "fancy".

So now, MS$ having eviscerated "Write", I retain a healthy oppostion to "Word" and can only wish this was some sort of anniversary of it's death as a program, clearing the way for the many superior wordpackaging programs around, which are more or less Free.

Lawrence

.rtf is all anybody should ever need
 
I was a WordStar user from version 0.something. Around 1987, I made the jump to WS2000 and stayed with it until about 1995. It was a very good editor, and much under-rated, even if it didn't support the old WS command keys. I still have many megabytes of WS2000 documents.
 
What's "T"? The only "T" I know is short for Technical Editor which is certainly not small. It's 100K, but has the advantage of not having a restriction on file size, which can be handy. That's why I keep it around.

Did you say TED? Yayy!! TED.COM rocks! I've been using it for years and it is still the most used program on my machines. I write articles with it, and not just little configuration files. At 3K it has got to be the best ever. Since actions are essentially instant in DOS I sometimes switch to Qedit for a quick paragraph formatting and also for doing multiple files - but still do the rough typing in TED. Because of the word wrap I also use Qedit if I'm transcribing or something where I don't see (or want to see) the screen.

By the way, I recently found a rewrite of TED called TERSE. It is 4K so still qualifies as small, but has a few improvements that are worth while.

I never could afford the big Word program and wouldn't give that much money to MS even if I could. Since I don't like to steal software I've always used alternatives for when I need something other than plain text editing, which is not very often. I find word processors in general to be a wimpy concept. You end up with huge files and a lot of trouble for everyone concerned and still you can't typeset properly. So what are they really for? I think they're for people who don't think their words will carry the day and want fancy fonts and layout to compensate, even though they don't know a hoot about typesetting. Word processors are neither fish nor foul. Microsoft Word is responsible for a lot of wasted IT resources - both human and hardware. /rant
 
Ole Juul wrote:

What's "T"? The only "T" I know is short for Technical Editor which is certainly not small. It's 100K, but has the advantage of not having a restriction on file size, which can be handy. That's why I keep it around.

Like I called it "T - Tiny Editor" the filename is simply called T.COM (or is that T.EXE? - I believe it's T.COM) - designed by IBM, it's a Free editor - which is only 9k in size! It has a couple of files which go with it - T.HLP is an extensive Help File. Anyone familiar with OS/2 would perhaps know this editor, though it works in DOS (which is Free). What's interesting about T (apart from being small - and handling files quite well) is the command line it has within it. From there you can do quite a wide range of functions (which are all documented from the HLP file - which you can view from that editor), and seems to be quite vast even thought it's a very small editor! You also have (like in Ted) a range of Functions you can perform just from the Function Keys. Can't quite remember how large a file you can get within T - The Tiny Editor - it may only be limited to 640k, though because it's such a small editor, text files can be quite large (even using IBM Text Graphics within T is quite easy for making Boxes, etc).

Did you say TED? Yayy!! TED.COM rocks! I've been using it for years and it is still the most used program on my machines. I write articles with it, and not just little configuration files. At 3K it has got to be the best ever. Since actions are essentially instant in DOS I sometimes switch to Qedit for a quick paragraph formatting and also for doing multiple files - but still do the rough typing in TED. Because of the word wrap I also use Qedit if I'm transcribing or something where I don't see (or want to see) the screen.

I mentioned TED only because it was converted to CP/M-86! :-D Rightly called TED86.CMD though! ;-)

By the way, I recently found a rewrite of TED called TERSE. It is 4K so still qualifies as small, but has a few improvements that are worth while.

Hmm, that would make T - The Tiny Editor quite large, pretty sure the executable file is around 9k! Probably because it does quite a lot!

EDIT: Further to my last comments about T - The Tiny Editor, you can download it from below! :-D

Tiny Editor (76k!) – Tim Baldwin / IBM, UK (1993)
 
Last edited:
Ibm 5150 capable software

Ibm 5150 capable software

Has anyone massed a collection of programs that will run on an IBM 4.77mhz computer, if so I wouldn't getting a copy of it, I just installed a large hard drive into my IBM XT and want to fill it with programs long forgotten that come from this computers hey day..
 
I'm not currently running an XT, but most of the software that I like and use could run on one. I've got what I think is the best collection of "tight" programs for DOS. I haven't published it because that would be a nightmare of checking legalities. Many are free, some are shareware, and a few are "other". :) If you're really interested, PM me. Meanwhile, you could start here: http://www.eunet.bg/simtel.net/msdos/index-msdos-pre.html Go for it!
 
I've got what I think is the best collection of "tight" programs for DOS. I haven't published it because that would be a nightmare of checking legalities. Many are free, some are shareware, and a few are "other". :)

Same here, but I don't care about legalities (if someone complains to me about 20-year-old software then I'll cease and desist, but until then, have at it). You can get my XT's hard drive with all of its goodies here: ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/misc/xtfiles.rar
 
Back
Top