Comment by teh_klev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teh_klev | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm must be older than you I guess :) . I was heavily involved in typesetting work between 1986 and 1990 (offset litho printing [0]). One of the tools we used for authoring was WordStar (and PostScript - we wrote a pile PostScript using WordStar's very capable text only editor mode).

WordStar beat the pants off of WordPerfect for technical layout and hackability when it came to printers and the like for rush documents. I used to mod WordStar to support printer escape sequences where there were none using a hex editor. That dated back to at least around 1985.

I still miss WordStar, its keycords (^K^B to begin a block), context menus and loads of other things outshone WordPerfect for technical writing. I wrote thousands of lines of DBase II/III and C using WordStar's text mode. Hell, even Brief (circa 1988) implemented the same keycords as WordStar, it was really popular with DOS app programmers back then (e.g. the Clipper season based releases before Clipper 5 arrived).

But then that was maybe the dev in me. WordStar was more versatile as a tool for both Word Processing and as a text editor. However WordPerfect was more loved by the non-technical writers and I can kinda see why, but I could never get my head around the function key sequences.

* caveats here being that I wasn't introduced to vi until 1987, just as I left college, and didn't have affordable access to unix until I stole a copy of SCO Unix for x86 around 1992.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offset_lithography

George Martin, author of the Game of Thrones series, STILL uses Wordstar on DOS to this day. :)

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/14/george_r_...

Borland's Turbo C (and presumably Turbo Pascal) used WordStar keybindings too. Nowadays I use JOE (Joe's Own Editor) which is a programmer's text editor with WordStar keybindings.

> WordStar beat the pants off of WordPerfect

Thanks for making teenager me feel vindicated! I still get nostalgia when I think of gray on blue text screens. The keybidings and menues were really easy to pick up compared with WP.

Somewhat related, I remember typesetting some project/essays in junior high-school on some DTP software on the Amiga. I can't recall the name now, but I don't think it was PageStream that seems to be most popular google hit (and is apparently still available both for Amiga OS, Windows and Linux): http://www.pagestream.org/?id=1663

Whatever software it was, the printer driver managed to output quite readable black text on our 9-pin dot-matrix printer (at an excruciatingly slow rate -- I remember pulling an all-nighter -- having finished a 10-20 page report on, I think nuclear weapons/the attacks on Japan -- at around 06:00 in the morning -- and the printout taking close to three hours making me late for school ...).

What was great about that pice, was that it followed the pattern of most modern DTP packages, with content-boxes that allowed you to flow text through them. And let you write your actual text in a plain ("distraction free") editor. Much better than the "rich" word processors at the time.

I still think Adobe's CSS region proposal[1] sounds pretty good -- not really as an addition to traditional CSS (a language suitable for styling, but unsuitable for layout) -- but as a way to augment CSS and HTML to become a language more-suited to layout (not good, not great, just not horribly bad). Lie[2], doesn't think so, but I think his perspective is inaccurate on this one. His points are valid, but I don't think he's really addressing the correct issue. CSS columns is a technical way to break up text. Allowing text to flow into boxes allows keeping the text plain and simple (think a classic html3 document with only text) and the layout separate (the divs/boxes). Lie appears to think in terms of a object/hypertext/rich document -- but that kind of thinking leads to single page apps where you can't read a blog article with js disabled.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-regions/

[2] http://alistapart.com/blog/post/css-regions-considered-harmf...

My mom wrote books using WordStar on the original IBM PC. She didn't like the default keys so she learned assembly to change them.

She didn't change ^K^B, I still remember that one.

I had to learn WordPerfect in High School and hated the clunky command codes and the keyboard overlays required to make sense of it all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com