On DOS, or something weird, like CP/M?
I once wrote a thesis on the latter, using a programming called Select…
Lots of places still use WordStar too, I understand
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That’s a massive if.
In this case, I only know about his wonky choice of software because he sent me something he wrote using it, and I had no idea how to open it. Even LibreOffice wasn’t compatible with the extension, and it couldn’t be converted to PDF either. He definitely needs interoperability if he expects other people to read what he’s written and doesn’t want to snail-mail it to them.
Like I said, he’s about 60, meaning he would have been in his mid-20s when this software came out. I can’t imagine that. Learning how to use something at age 25 and then not bothering to learn anything that came afterward. It seems like such a young age to become set in one’s ways.
Okay, you have a point.
I also suspect that the latest version of MS Word might cause seizures, but I haven’t proven this.
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Nothing weird about CP/M or Wordstar.
Wordstar was a hell of a lot more productive than Word. My wife wrote a novel using Wordstar on my Osborne 1 and I have no reason to believe that it would be much easier or faster for her to do it on the machine I am using now.
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Probably not now. The reason someone 80 years old and that set in their ways is selling thier house is almost certainly not good news.
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Man, if I ever am selling a house, I’m going to have way too much fun setting up crazy stuff.
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Yeah…for some reason this post just made me feel sad more than anything else.
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The Mac Plus was innovative, but pretty much crap; I had a ridiculous toolset for opening them up to work on. It was made of giant clips and part of an elevator servicing tool, I think, or something like that, just random junk that worked. But I got so I could fix some problems without opening the cases on the Plus and SE… smack it hard in just the right spot to reseat the video card, for example.
The imagewriters were serial printers. I used to have a stack of them I used for console printers on large multiuser systems and Internet routers, until I ran out of working ones.
I never bothered to fix one, I just threw the non-working one in the recycling and pulled another off the stack until I ran out of them. By then everyone thought I was completely mad for keeping hard copy console logs anyway.
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From my days as a repair tech all I remember was a special screwdriver and then odd applications of force. I could be wrong?
The screwdriver was ridiculously long, right? I made one out of another tool that had an elevator company logo on it.
But that was quite a while ago, I haven’t fixed a mac+ in 15 or 20 years.
Very long as it had to get the full width of the case to reach to the screws which were attached to the front face plate.
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I did not perceive this as making fun of elderly people who are out of touch. It seemed to me more like, “wow, I can’t believe someone is still using one of these. Cool!” But maybe that’s just because that was my reaction, which may be influenced by the fact that I desperately wanted one of these my freshman year in college, but my parents just got me a typewriter.
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All my soap dispensers will be penis shaped. For reasons.
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Actually that doesn’t surprise me, but I do wonder how does the old person type with boxing gloves on?
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Maybe the house is too much house for them at that age, or they want to move closer to their kids and grandkids. Even assisted living isn’t that bad of news, just a big change of life.
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I know of several professional writers who continue to use whatever obsolete word processor they first learned to use way back when (Wordstar, Macwrite, Protext, etc). However, they also have a system for getting the text into something standard-ish (plain text, rtf, whatever) so they can send their stuff to an editor once it’s written.
What I was thinking of was people like those writers. I agree that it’s really incredibly stupid and inconsiderate to try to send someone else a thing in a format that nothing made in this century knows how to open.
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She is not alone.
For any free-software nerds wondering what Wordstar is, it looks a lot like nano.
Or, that is, of course, nano is a distantly indirect clone of Wordstar.
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It could be stairs, too much yard & garden, too far away from doctors, maybe they no longer drive, other reasons to downsize.
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The image of the old Mac and Imagewriter brought a smile to my face.
Carl Kruse
Here you go. Boing Boing on a Mac Plus:
I bought this Mac Plus in 1995 for $40 from a local thrift shop, and up until 1998 it was in active use by my college roommates and friends who would carry it around the house and use it with Microsoft Word 4.0 for various writing assignments.
It sat in storage from 1999 to 2017, until I pulled it out of a box in my parents’ attic. It’s now set up with an SD Card “hard drive” and a Raspberry Pi for network access. There’s no hard drive or fan, so it’s completely silent, and the keyboard is amazing to type on.
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I wrote my PhD thesis in WordStar on a Morrow MicroDecision, but had to create and load up a bunch of TSR programs to handle the math characters. Modern systems certainly beat it for scientific word processing, but for text-only it is a hard system to beat.
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