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What were some good non-G.U.I. environment word processor software packages?

I used Wordsar 2000 for several years. It really was better than plain Wordstar in a lot of respects. Bugs were cleaned up with new releases. One thing that it handled very nicely was prop spacing and had very many advanced features. it included Star Exchange, which could hand a pretty wide variety of alien formats. But yes, it was different in commands, etc. I briefly tried Ami Pro, but didn't care for it and went back to WS2K.

Old habits die hard--including editing keys with touch typists. I still use the Joe editor on Linux, DOS and Windows, which is about as close to WS as you can get.

Wordstar 4 was released both in PC x86 and CP/M x80 versions, which to my knowledge, makes it unique in the world of word processing.
 
vwestlife said:
WordStar was king in the early to mid '80s. Its mnemonic Ctrl-key command structure was a brilliant system once you learned it. Fast typists loved it because it kept your fingers over the letter keys while performing commands, instead of having to move over to the F-keys or even the arrow keys (since it had an embedded "cursor diamond"). Many text editors, including MS-DOS EDIT, retained support for many of the WordStar Ctrl-keys well into the '90s.
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Ctrl-Y still works in a lot of software. It's not much, but it's better than nothing.
 
For the OP: The book "In Search of Stupidity" devotes a section to the travails of WordStar. While much is made of the marketing problem of trying to have two high-end wordprocessors (each with major flaws), the managerial failure to successfully complete any development project except by bringing back former superstar programmers is laid out in detail. Older members who lived through the market shift may have perceived events differently.

WordPerfect won out on DOS by having the lineup of desired features paired with very good speed. WordPerfect's other advantage of great phone support turned into a major cost when WordPerfect's revenue declined thanks to cheaper upgrades and WordPerfect had a number of buggy releases.
 
Well, Wordstar eventually won out over WS 2000; AFAIK, Wordstar 7 for Windows was the last release of that package. By then, true WYSIWYG displays were the rule. I still find the "too intelligent for your own good" GUI word processors to be confusing at times.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Well, Wordstar eventually won out over WS 2000; AFAIK, Wordstar 7 for Windows was the last release of that package. By then, true WYSIWYG displays were the rule. I still find the "too intelligent for your own good" GUI word processors to be confusing at times.
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WordStar for Windows wasn't even designed by Micro Pro. They bought a small company's Windows word processor, added the WordStar Ctrl-command structure to it, and slapped the "WordStar for Windows" name on it. It was actually a crossover between a word processor and a desktop publishing application. I heard good things about it, but it lagged a distant fourth behind Word, WordPerfect, and Ami Pro/Word Pro.
 
Yeah, the desktop word processing arena was getting pretty crowded. I still have a copy of WS7 for Windows somewhere, but haven't used it in years.
 
WordStar for Windows was originally from NBI famous for gigantic displays at trade shows. Still mediocre product. In WordStar's hands, it got multiple buggy releases such that there is a support page listing how to combine DLLs from various versions to get something close to stable. Xoom Word Pro was another descendant of the same code base and I think NBI's code also emerged in a fourth form.

http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/book/wordprocessor/word.html has market share figures from 1986 on. Before, on the PC, WordStar would have been the biggest but 50 other small players would have each have a tiny sliver of the market. Getting a single large insurer to sign on would instantly transform a vendor into a market leader.

As the need for graphics increased, DOS programs became expensive to develop. WordPerfect 6 incorporated a home-grown GUI replete with drawing programs and file management tools.
 
krebizfan said:
http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/book/wordprocessor/word.html has market share figures from 1986 on. Before, on the PC, WordStar would have been the biggest but 50 other small players would have each have a tiny sliver of the market. Getting a single large insurer to sign on would instantly transform a vendor into a market leader.
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The oddest little 1980s DOS word processor I've come across is Norton Textra Writer... by the W.W. Norton book publishing company, not by Peter Norton! They claimed it was popular with college students -- probably at the schools that W.W. Norton sold textbooks to.
 
Trixter said:
I learned only recently that Word was created using the Charles Simonyi idea of creating a generic virtual machine...The obvious goal was so that the same application could be ported to other architectures... I'm not sure Word for DOS actually got ported anywhere.
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There was a version for the RM-Nimbus - an 80186/88 based machine for the educational marked with a different memory map (and it's own versions of everything accordingly). I spent many hours with Word for DOS, and ScripSit before that. It was especially satisfying in the latter to essentially make your own printer driver from the control codes in the printer manual!
 
It wasn't Simonyl's idea--compiler writers knew about this for a much longer time. In the micro world, consider Ryan-McFarland. They could port their BASIC practically overnight--and even then, it wasn't new. It extended into the mainframe world decades before that.

But as we all know, Steve Jobs invented the personal computer, just as Nikola Tesla invented alternating current...
 
There was a port of Word for Xenix/SCO Unix. Supposedly that is where it was developed as "Multi-Tool Word". There was also a port for the HP-150, and as I recall it was modified to make use of the touch screen (in ~1984!)
 
My previous posted list says that Sierra HomeWord wasn't for Tandy, but in fact it was or is. My set came on 2 DS/DD 5 1/4" floppies. The 'Master' disk indicates it's for IBM PC and PCjr, and the other is the 'Speller'. I think the Radio Shack store manager gave the program to me when I bought my 1000SX back in 1986. HomeWord is truly the 'Dick & Jane - run Spot run' of word processors. You really need two floppy drives to run the thing properly. You get 40 column text which really looks terrific if you happen to have it connected to a CGA monitor (lol). But, having said all of that, it was my first personal PC WP, and I managed to crank out of few things with it on my trusty Gorilla Banana DMP, which by the way, didn't have lower case descenders. A Tandy DMP-130 and Word Perfect was soon to follow.
 
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I've been through DEC Runoff, ND Notis WP and other more-or-less troff-like systems for other minis, WordStar, a bit of WordPerfect, then to later and bigger setups like FrameMaker, swearing over MS Word, before I finally took a look at LaTeX and I've never bothered with the rest after that. I use whatever *text* editor I'm the most productive with, my co-workers can use what *they* are most productive with (completely different editors, typically..), and the result is produced quickly, can be version controlled in a meaningful way (CVS, Git, whatever), collaborated on, can be transformed via a Perl script if suddenly chaptering has to be done differently or whatever.
Creating proper style setups is the only hard part, but you only need one person to do that. The writers just write and the style doc I wrote years ago needs little if any maintenance.
 
SWYFT Software which became the foundation of the Cannon Cat. It's a fairly unique word processing environment concieved by Jef Raskin and his cohorts.

regards,
Mike Willegal
 
It was awful in almost every way, but I grew to love many of the version's of Radio Shack's Scripsit.

They were all different, yet oddly familiar. I've used it on a a model II (TRS-DOS) , model 4 (TRS-DOS) , a model 1000 (MS-DOS), a model 16 in Xenix and also a version that ran under SCO Unix/Xenix.

God help me, I learned to do a lot with that beastly program.
 
kb2syd

When the company that I worked for received their TRS-80 Model II setup, back in 1981 or so, the word processor of choice (for us) was Scripsit. We were located way up north in Michigan's lower peninsula, and about 4 or 5 blocks from being in the "sticks". We didn't have ready access to all the latest name-brand software packages, and it had to be relatively simple to use. Most of the staff had never seen a PC, let alone use one. I had a Model 100 purchased through a company plan, and was able to a find small version of Scripsit that would run on it. Kind of primitive by today's standards, but considered to be on the leading edge back in the early 80's.
 
I don't suppose the Canon Cat really counts, but it's got the cleanest and most intuitive word processing software I've ever seen.
 
In my field service travels in the 70's it seemed every big business office had some Wang word processors in use. I didn't know about it at the time, but the Wang wiki page says their OIS model in the late 70's was 8080 based and multiuser.
 
I used to have a whole slew of their OIS machines. Unfortunately they went in the trash due to space constraints and lack of interested takers.

Very interesting machines though.

They have no qualms about boasting their make when you turn them on.
 
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