On 8 July 2016 at 20:00, Chuck Guzis <[email protected]> wrote: > On 07/08/2016 10:27 AM, Liam Proven wrote: > > >> Only hardcore IBM customers used DisplayWrite. It had, naturally, >> great support for IBM's (rather expensive but very solid) laser >> printers, which were slightly competitive and popular around the end >> of the 1980s/beginning of the 1990s. Odd spindly fonts, as I recall. >> >> My first employers sold a lot of copies of Ashton-Tate MultiMate, as >> it was the only mainstream network-aware WP for DOS LANs -- it >> supported both Netware and 3Com 3+Share, which was also popular >> around that time. It may have done file locking and network-drive >> shared templates, but as you say, proportionally-spaced fonts were a >> problem. > > > What I found surprising about the IBM Displaywriter was that much of the > "smarts" of the thing resided in the printer firmware itself (e.g. > underlining, bolding, etc.) and not the DW CPU unit--and, of course, the > printer used EBCDIC.
Aha. I have never seen an actual DisplayWriter -- note that final "r". DisplayWrite (no "r" on the end) was a WP package for DOS. I believe it looked & worked quite like a hardware DisplayWriter, but as I said, I wouldn't know. I'm quite curious and I'm sorry I missed out on them. Oddly, at least oddly I was told, quite a few people/companies bought & used DisplayWrite even if they never had or used a hardware DisplayWriter. It wasn't very competitive but it was good enough -- the "professional" tier of early DOS wordprocessors were all expensive and rather arcane. It's also something that seemed to cause a major divide across the Atlantic, for some odd reason. Brits almost never paid for or registered shareware, I'm told, whereas many North Americans did and it could be a lucrative business. Over here in Europe it wasn't taken very seriously so none of the shareware WPs took off. The American magazines I read talked of WPs I'd never seen -- and as a professional skill I learned just about every WP program I could set hands on on DOS and Mac. Brits used ones that were obscure in N America, and vice versa. > There were a mess of PC word processors, as well as CP/M ones. > WordPerfect, PerfectWriter, PC Write, Palantir, Electric Pencil... Heard of the latter 2, never saw them. Oh, and there was LetterPerfect, too, the cheap cut-down WordPerfect. > I recall that the preferred one for the AVR Eagle systems was > Spellbinder and that it had a lot of adherents--I don't know if it was > ever offered for the PC platform. I am not sure but I think so, yes. > On occasion, I still use an editor that I wrote for CP/M and later > ported to DOS. 11KB and it has lots of features that are peculiar to my > preferences. I'd thought about porting it to Linux, but currently, it's > still in assembly and dealing with terminfo or curses is not something > that I look forward to. So I use Joe. :-) There are or were lots of odd editors for the PC. IBM E was one -- apparently it's quite like some mainframe tool. Came with PC-DOS and was... strange. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: [email protected] • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: [email protected] • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)
