Re: New WiFi adapter

On 2025-06-05 10:49, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 04/06/2025 23:58, c186282 wrote:

On 6/4/25 4:21 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Wed, 4 Jun 2025 20:47:08 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>

  04/06/2025 20:37, rbowman wrote:

On Wed, 4 Jun 2025 01:14:15 -0400, c186282 wrote:
>

     Remember all the great IBM-PC/BIOS routines ?
     Made it EASY to write full-screen editors. You had to have the
     "Technical Reference Manual" to know all that stuff, however I did
     have that ....

>
And everyone felt compelled to write an editor...

>
Fuck that. Wordstar had been available on CP/M for ages, and was better
than vi.
So when it turned up on DOS everyone grabbed a pirate copy. 'joe'
emulates it these days for Linux
>

>
Definitely. WordStar was bundled on the Osborne 1 CP/M I bought in '81 and
hat is what I used. When I moved to DOS I used Brief which was designed to
be a programming editor.
>
The 'write an editor' think could be traced to the programming books of
the day. They tended to use string handling in their examples and it
followed 'Oh, I can write an editor'.
>
I wrote cross-assemblers when they weren't available or expensive but I
was happy with available editors. I did not use vi. Vim (vi improved) is a
hell of an improvement but that was more than 10 years in the future.
>
vi in most Linux distros is a symlink to Vim so many who claim to use vi
aren't using the original Bill Joy version.

>
   Umm ... are we talking WordSTAR or WordPERFECT here ?
>

WordStar produced plain text files It was an editor.

It had a method to indicate underline, bold, double size... I don't remember how. Hidden codes like ".XY"?
But then it had trouble calculating the page size. I believe I had to force page jump earlier.

 Word produced its own format -  it  was a primitive word processor
 

   I've used both - indeed even WS on a Kaypro CP/M box -
   but WordPerfect was much better. The old boss still
   used it for everything until he retired a few years
   ago. Fortunately LibreOffice could at least READ WP
   files (not sure if ever became able to write them).
>
>

Word Perfect was in many ways Perfect...Just enough features to be useful to write letters and short documents on with an easy interface.

Indeed it was perfect. I could have complicated pages and it still got the page size correct.

 Word suffered from 'creeping feauturism' and couldn't decide whether it was a desktop publishing suite or a thing to write letters and manuals with.
 Well had to use it because everyone else sent is Word files, etc etc.

That was in the late 90's. With Windows.
--
Cheers, Carlos.