Processing words
A recent, and very long-winded, thread on rec.arts.sf.composition about wysiwyg vs editors/formatters for fiction authors coincided with a blog posting by some high-ranking Microsoft manager who's worked on Word for a long time. And that combination unchained the reminiscing beast in me...
You see, despite being only thirty-four years old, I've about twenty-two years of experience with being aided by chips in composing text. It started with my Sinclair ZX-Spectrum. Not that I had anything to write about, but I avidly collected word processors, from TasWord to The Last Word, which was anything but, but very good anyway.
Fortunately, I didn't commit any immortelles to magnetic tape with either of those, or any of their competitors. Because at that time, my parents owned not only a real old-fashioned analog typewriter with hammers and everything, but also a Brother plotter/typewriter that carefully wrote out every letter you typed with a tiny little bit of a biro refill. In four colours, with graphs and everything. And you could correct any mistake, provided you noticed you'd made it within the last twenty characters. A friend of mine, Paul Eisner, thought I'd written -- calligraphed, almost -- the texts I published for Fantas, the periodical of the Genootschap voor Geofictie, myself, by hand. An understandable mistake, because the output of that typewriter was wobbly enough to masquerade as handwriting, especially for someone with handwriting as neat and legible as Paul Eisner.
Shortly afterwards I had saved enough money to replace the ZX-Spectrum (whose "j" key had broken -- and any Speccy-user knows what a disaster that is) with a PC. And IBM-clone, a Spring Circle Super Turbo 8086 at -- a whole 8 Mhz. And with it came a pirated DOS clone, and nothing else, but the neighbour across the street could provide me with The Quill, a word-processor originally designed for Sinclair's Quantum Leap 86008 micro by Psion. I've still got quite a lot of texts in that particular binary format. Cannot read those anymore, since the Quill came on 5 1/4" floppies, and we don't have a machine with one of those beasts anymore. Fortunately, I have print-outs of most of the stuff. By that time, I was 16 years old. The Quill was little more than a glorified typewriter, and had a hard time handling documents with more than thirty pages.
My next wordprocessor was WP 4.1. Or 4.2, I'm not sure. Either way, I used WordPerfect (an illegal copy, not honestly bought, I'm afraid) for a long, long time. I've got more than my allotted average of megabytes per human per year still stored in that format. Unfortunately, I don't have either version of WordPerfect, nor yet a later version, the Linux version of WordPerfect 8 being incompatible with current X11 libraries. But that's a later story: all that matters is that I cannot read the documents anymore, and that I really liked WP 4.2. It was simple, ran well on the aforementioned 8086, gave me plenty of lines of text (23!) and didn't get in my way. I still have the keybindings in my fingers.
WordPerfect 4.2 was followed by 5.1 (and perhaps 5.2 -- I disremember). 5.1 was a nice wordprocessor. It had italics, and could center text. And I was able to -- with the help of a hex-editor -- translate the application into Denden. Large documents, complex documents, entire grammars -- no problem. I've got megabytes of text in WordPerfect 5.2 for DOS format. Pity I cannot read it anymore... Forgot to save it all as plain text, I guess.
I had to leave WordPerfect for Word for Windows, version 2, because I needed to include IPA characters in my papers for Sjors van Driem. And when I learned that it was possible to get more than that silly letterbox worth of lines between all the rulers and toolbars on screen, I was quite happy. Wordbasic was fun, and even if Word wasn't quite able to handle large documents, I was happy and productive. Again, megabytes of text -- only Word 2 for Windows needed rather more bytes per letter than did WordPerfect. But I had -- have -- dozens of templates for Word 2. (Word 2 used to run pretty well under wine, but since a year or three it doesn't anymore)
And then came Word 6. And all my templates were useless. All my Wordbasic macroes were useless. Worse -- Word 6 couldn't read my Word 2 documents without errors, and, even worse, not only messed up the pagination of really long documents, but just messed them up, corrupted them. I lost megabytes of text through Word 6. Fortunately, not much actual text, in terms of wordcount, because Word 6 really made files balloon.
Around that time, 1993 I guess, I started playing with Linux. I was rather miffed that there wasn't any decent wordprocessor for X, and the group of Linux users was so small at the time, that Matt Welsh took the time to tell me that if I missed that application, I should write one myself. That was quite beyond my capabilities, so I settled for Jed, and later vi. And I created megabytes of text. That I can still read.
Even nowdays, when I mostly use XEmacs... And herein lies a less: plain text (utf-8 format) with formatting codes in plain text, is your safeguard for the future. Even if there are nowadays nice wordprocessors for X11: Abiword, and KWord, and OpenOffice writer.
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