Wait and see. There are rogues in every generation who will invent something new, but they are in minority… most people follow technology, a few resist it sometimes for moral reasons, and even fewer invent it.
Pope Leo has likened AI to the Tower of Babel.
He has a point, it is a distraction from some of our most important problems.
I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to teach or do a degree never mind something higher with so much AI around which appears to answer all questions. When I was studying and teaching you had to do research from so many different sources but now it is so ready available.
The Pope has remarkable vision.
Nearly every post here kinda missed the point of the youtube video…
Veronica didn’t use the WriterDeckOS - she installed Debian and got it setup as a TTY only device… and she chose vi/vim/neovim as her editor…
Another great TTY only writing tool is “WordGrinder” - it also supports some rudimentary formatting (e.g. bold etc)…
And there’s also “WordTsar” a virtual clone of WordStar…
And - may even have posted it on here - or someone else - Linux users have managed to get the SCO Unix or Xenix versions of Lotus 123 and WordPerfect to run on Linux…
Would like to see that, guess you are talking the dos version not a gui version ?
SCO / XENIX - not MS-DOS… and yeah - NOT GUI version… Pretty much the apps discussed here are TTY terminal only apps, CLI and TUI…
I reckon getting either running in DOS-BOX would be trivial…
I have some CD’s of old DOS programs … mostly C.
I might see if I can find anything useful.
Compiling old C programs is easy, as long as they dont have system calls. Some may have 8/16/32/64 bit issues.
I’ve run IBM DisplayWrite 3 on DOS-BOX - works just fine…
That was the first wordprocessor I ever used - on MS-DOS… It originated as a mainframe app - and you could also buy an IBM wordprocessor machine - that only did wordprocessing - that came with only DisplayWriter (no DOS or anything, I think)…
Where did the term ‘WordProcessor’ come from?
Before it appeared, we used to talk about ‘text formatting’ and ‘typesetting’
No doubt a marketing department…
Yeah. I think the big selling point was WP was wysiwyg.
But even so - wysiwyg wasn’t really a thing until the very late 80’s and early 90’s …
Lotus 123 didn’t go WYSIWYG until version 3 which implemented “Graphics Mode” (not a Windows GUI app though)…
And on Microsoft Word 6 (for MS-DOS) and Displaywrite 4 - if you had a VGA (or IBM monochrome) card and display - you could swith to “graphic mode” and if you had a mouse it would change to a pointer from a block cursor - and it would display italicised text slanting - and you could install more fonts - but there only ever representations of what the printer would churn out… Heck - even on Windows 3 - if you wanted to WYSIWYG the fonts - you had to run Adobe Type Manager - Microsoft TTF wasn’t introduced until Windows 3.1…
Yeah, but it is the difference between an editor and a word processor, I think?
Before WP , you put visible formatting commands in the text with an editor (like it Tex) and then you fed it thru a phototypesetter to view it … initially only on paper , then things like gv appeared.
I’ve seen Wordperfect for DOS users working - no wysiwyg - they’d mark somehing as bold - and it might brighten a bit - but not italics… no preview of the font output…
You didn’t see the formatting and fonts of what you were typing till you printed it… I can remember some DOS programs even let you select a font at the print menu…
My first teaching post at a 16 plus college was offering courses in lotus 123 to accountants. That was version 1.1 for dos. I then qualified through lotus UK to become a lotus certified technician and our college became a business partner. Moved on to teach at uni same students just to degree level. So went through version 2 and on to version 3 with the WYSIWYG add on to make it look better.
I applied for a job at a hospital and they wanted a demo of my 123 skills plus wordperfect. After 30 mins on 123 covering relative and absolute addressing they just asked if I had the same knowledge on wordperfect I of course replied YES, but to be honest I had never seen it or used it. They gave me the job so I had to learn quick.
About 2 months into the new post we swapped to windows and excel word etc which was much easier. But I was still the point of reference on any spreadsheet calculations or use.
I never saw those versions, but when I put dos i actual mean non windows versions.
Lotus 123 for mac and windows was poor, wordperfect for windows was really bad. Hence Microsoft took the market.
I’ll concur - 123 on MS-DOS, along with Wordstar, and DBase III - were the killer apps that made the x86 platform so successful - and thus Microsoft reign supreme… not only but also brilliant TSRs like Borland’s SideKick (TSR was a “terminate and stay resident” thing that hook into task switching on a single context 8/16 bit platform)…
Even so Lotus 123 was just a clone of VisiCalc… Shame on you Mitch Kapur…
And Lotus tried to make money off their CC-Mail and Lotus:Notes platforms (and almost neglected 123 - their former cash cow)… What utter rubbish they were… I still have customers that have bend over backwards to leverage hideous legacy shyte like Lotus Notes…
Notes was just horrible… I had to work for a company that was a big IBM shop and they forced us to use shonky apps written in Lotus Notes API - they were truly awful… The worst one was the weekly timesheet system… Stuff of nightmares from a use-abilty perspective…
And some 15ish years ago I was working for an “energy” utility - their “SOE” was Windows XP - but it was hamstrung by Novell Netware NDS (with ghastly hooks into LDAP) and Lotus Notes - seriously - I timed it with a stopwatch one morning - it was OVER 15 minutes to go from login to Novell NDS and have the Lotus Notes app show my inbox?
Email? Don’t make me laugh!
I could deliver information faster 10 years before when I was a motorcycle courier!
Much as I kinda hate Microsoft - Active Directory craps all over LDAP and Novell NDS…
At one stage I thought lotus were going to offer me a job at the Windsor location as I had written a program to push 123 from single user to multi user on a network. Then after they brought out notes and were bought by IBM I was glad the offer did not come.
Forgot all about Borland sidekick that was such a revolution at the time
@daniel.m.tripp , @callpaul.eu
Whike you guys were grappling with all this DOS rubbish, I was quietly migrating from CP/M to BSD Unix.
I missed most of the wordprocessor and spreadsheet revolution and landed with Tex and R in FreeBSD. I never tried Win until I got a laptop with XP. It was rapidly made to multiboot Debian.
I believe I am better off for having missed all those supposed gui benefits.
Yes there are some, pictures tell a thousand words.
Whilst you took the easy road some of us moved through DOS to CCPM then to windows 2, windows 3, GEM, 95, 98, NT … but apple made it so much better. Whilst working for them I had to run courses on system 5 then 6 which were planned to run all day, but really only took 1 hour max. The 2 day advanced system 7.5 including networking and installation again took a lot to spin out to fill the time.