5 ms·

The Write Stuff for the Commodore 128

92 points by erickhill 7y ago

stevenicr 7y ago
I found a manual for one similar for the C64 in the garage, as I looked at the feature list, I thought, pretty much everything you use for Msft Word and similar - all on a 1 MB floppy right? It's amazing what could be done back in the day, and how much money and time and disk space is used these days to do just a bit more.
- erickhill 7y ago
  Back then the disk capacities were only 170 kB (5.25") on a single side of a disk. Pretty crazy. And the actual word processor in the article - written in machine language - was only 25K. Most user avatars or site logos on the web these days probably come close to the same size. Hah!
- tinus_hn 7y ago
  It’s more like almost everything from the old WordPerfect. I think if you actually try using this you’ll quickly notice the limitations, no tables, no fonts, no graphics and very little usability.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    I can't answer for this one, but the laser printers used to have some fonts built in you could switch between, and it looks like it had tables, if the printed documentation is anything to go by.
    - tinus_hn 7y ago
      The page has a list of available commands. It only appears to support fixed width text with super or subscript or double width text for emphasis. No sizing etc. And of course you aren’t going to be able to fit unicodes 65k+ characters in 16k of memory. It supports text blocks for basic dtp purposes, but there are no commands for tables.
      - jerf 7y ago
        "And of course you aren’t going to be able to fit unicodes 65k+ characters in 16k of memory." I'd love to see "Someone" do a breakdown on a modern "bloated" program, albeit something written in C or something (i.e., not "Electron") compared to an 8-bit program, with an eye to that sort of thing. Some of our "bloat" is understandable; you want at least some fraction of unicode. Variable-width fonts are nice. On a 64-bit machine, 64-bit words are fairly natural for numbers and that ends up taking up substantially more space than an 8-bit value, but it's definitely nice to not have things arbitrarily limited to 255 everywhere. Something like a relatively barebones vi vs. The Write Stuff, or maybe nano or some other baby editor.
- mhd 7y ago
  On the other hand, if you look at those 8 bit word processors, the reason why PCs were considered "serious" is quite apparent. Going from a C64 word processor to e.g. early versions of WordStar is quite a jump. After that, not a lot of really interesting things happened in that area. Embedding tables and collaborative editing maybe. (Although I haven't worked with a C128 WP, the 80 column mode should at least bring graphical fidelity to the same high level…)
- cstross 7y ago
  > pretty much everything you use for Msft Word and similar - all on a 1 MB floppy Somewhere in my pile of not-quite-abandonware I have a copy of the install floppies for Microsoft Word 5.1a for Macintosh, circa 1988/89. All three of them -- and the last one held the spelling checker dictionaries. IIRC you could run Word off floppy, although ideally it wanted 2-4Mb of disk space. And it had most of the features we associate with Word today, including full WYSIWYG -- the only significant omission was Word BASIC. which showed up in Word 6. (Word 6 was a bit of a mess -- bloated from 3 floppies to 20, ran sluggishly, broke all sorts of UI guidelines -- because MS's Mac developers got downsized and in the end Word 6 on the Mac was Word 6 for Windows with some sort of Windows-to-Mac compatibility shim that didn't work terribly well.) (I wrote my first published -- non-fiction -- book with Word 5.1 for MacOS.)
  - ecpottinger 7y ago
    I had Word on three disks for the Amiga, yes the disks were 880K each, but Microsoft figured out how to use it all. I design and built a three drive enclosure to add to my Amiga (The Amigas could support 4 drives) and not having to swap disks while you worked or printed made a big different in ease of use.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
bouncycastle 7y ago
Ahh, Maverick! Brings the memories back. The joy when I discovered that you could use it to alter specific disk contents! So, I used it to find text, alter it, then copy for friends. Eg. "Turn the disk over and press space" became "turn the shit over and press space". You could write yourself in the game credits too, and so on. (Just make sure that the new text fits in the chunk you're overwriting) It was also the go-to copy program for that early p2p file sharing network we had :-)
sfg 7y ago
What else did Busy Bee Software do? What became of them?
- lowercased 7y ago
  https://cbm-products.fandom.com/wiki/Busy_Bee_Software https://cbm-products.fandom.com/wiki/Busy_Bee_Software can't find too much more.
  - sfg 7y ago
    Thank you.
zozbot234 7y ago
To the author (if you're reading this): please image those disks ASAP and take scans of the manuals, and upload the whole thing to Internet Archive Software Collections, C64 and C128 sections. IA is literally an archive, so they are expressly allowed to store this content for the benefit of allowed users, even when copyright law would prevent most people from doing this on their own.
- sterwill 7y ago
  Can you explain how an organization that calls itself an archive gets treated differently than another organization under US law? I'm not aware of any exemptions for archival.
  - homarp 7y ago
    they don't, per https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360014759692-Rights https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360014759692-Righ... what they will do though is keep it in their archive and a) put it online waiting for some entites to complain. b) if someone does complain and it's a valid complain, the content will be 'offlined', but still avail in their archive. The day it becomes 'legal', they'll put it back online. for old software, cf what they are doing for the Apple 2, where flux images of the disks are archived https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_apple_woz https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_apple_woz Old manuals are scanned too https://archive.org/details/savetz_stacks https://archive.org/details/savetz_stacks
    - sterwill 7y ago
      Thanks for the links. I'm a big fan of the Internet Archive. I browse their content regularly for fun, and have even contributed one old (1990s!) piece of software.
    - bane 7y ago
      The savetz_stacks are by Kevin Savetz, one of the hosts of the ANTIC Atari 8-bit podcast, which has had hundreds of incredible interviews with people from across the 8-bit computing industry. Totally worth listening to.

92 points by erickhill 7y ago

I found a manual for one similar for the C64 in the garage, as I looked at the feature list, I thought, pretty much everything you use for Msft Word and similar - all on a 1 MB floppy right? It's amazing what could be done back in the day, and how much money and time and disk space is used these days to do just a bit more.

erickhill 7y ago
Back then the disk capacities were only 170 kB (5.25") on a single side of a disk. Pretty crazy. And the actual word processor in the article - written in machine language - was only 25K. Most user avatars or site logos on the web these days probably come close to the same size. Hah!
tinus_hn 7y ago
It’s more like almost everything from the old WordPerfect. I think if you actually try using this you’ll quickly notice the limitations, no tables, no fonts, no graphics and very little usability.
- jacobush 7y ago
  I can't answer for this one, but the laser printers used to have some fonts built in you could switch between, and it looks like it had tables, if the printed documentation is anything to go by.
  - tinus_hn 7y ago
    The page has a list of available commands. It only appears to support fixed width text with super or subscript or double width text for emphasis. No sizing etc. And of course you aren’t going to be able to fit unicodes 65k+ characters in 16k of memory. It supports text blocks for basic dtp purposes, but there are no commands for tables.
    - jerf 7y ago
      "And of course you aren’t going to be able to fit unicodes 65k+ characters in 16k of memory." I'd love to see "Someone" do a breakdown on a modern "bloated" program, albeit something written in C or something (i.e., not "Electron") compared to an 8-bit program, with an eye to that sort of thing. Some of our "bloat" is understandable; you want at least some fraction of unicode. Variable-width fonts are nice. On a 64-bit machine, 64-bit words are fairly natural for numbers and that ends up taking up substantially more space than an 8-bit value, but it's definitely nice to not have things arbitrarily limited to 255 everywhere. Something like a relatively barebones vi vs. The Write Stuff, or maybe nano or some other baby editor.
mhd 7y ago
On the other hand, if you look at those 8 bit word processors, the reason why PCs were considered "serious" is quite apparent. Going from a C64 word processor to e.g. early versions of WordStar is quite a jump. After that, not a lot of really interesting things happened in that area. Embedding tables and collaborative editing maybe. (Although I haven't worked with a C128 WP, the 80 column mode should at least bring graphical fidelity to the same high level…)
cstross 7y ago
> pretty much everything you use for Msft Word and similar - all on a 1 MB floppy Somewhere in my pile of not-quite-abandonware I have a copy of the install floppies for Microsoft Word 5.1a for Macintosh, circa 1988/89. All three of them -- and the last one held the spelling checker dictionaries. IIRC you could run Word off floppy, although ideally it wanted 2-4Mb of disk space. And it had most of the features we associate with Word today, including full WYSIWYG -- the only significant omission was Word BASIC. which showed up in Word 6. (Word 6 was a bit of a mess -- bloated from 3 floppies to 20, ran sluggishly, broke all sorts of UI guidelines -- because MS's Mac developers got downsized and in the end Word 6 on the Mac was Word 6 for Windows with some sort of Windows-to-Mac compatibility shim that didn't work terribly well.) (I wrote my first published -- non-fiction -- book with Word 5.1 for MacOS.)
- ecpottinger 7y ago
  I had Word on three disks for the Amiga, yes the disks were 880K each, but Microsoft figured out how to use it all. I design and built a three drive enclosure to add to my Amiga (The Amigas could support 4 drives) and not having to swap disks while you worked or printed made a big different in ease of use.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

bouncycastle 7y ago

Ahh, Maverick! Brings the memories back. The joy when I discovered that you could use it to alter specific disk contents! So, I used it to find text, alter it, then copy for friends. Eg. "Turn the disk over and press space" became "turn the shit over and press space". You could write yourself in the game credits too, and so on. (Just make sure that the new text fits in the chunk you're overwriting) It was also the go-to copy program for that early p2p file sharing network we had :-)

sfg 7y ago

What else did Busy Bee Software do? What became of them?

lowercased 7y ago
https://cbm-products.fandom.com/wiki/Busy_Bee_Software https://cbm-products.fandom.com/wiki/Busy_Bee_Software can't find too much more.
- sfg 7y ago
  Thank you.

zozbot234 7y ago

To the author (if you're reading this): please image those disks ASAP and take scans of the manuals, and upload the whole thing to Internet Archive Software Collections, C64 and C128 sections. IA is literally an archive, so they are expressly allowed to store this content for the benefit of allowed users, even when copyright law would prevent most people from doing this on their own.

sterwill 7y ago
Can you explain how an organization that calls itself an archive gets treated differently than another organization under US law? I'm not aware of any exemptions for archival.
- homarp 7y ago
  they don't, per https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360014759692-Rights https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360014759692-Righ... what they will do though is keep it in their archive and a) put it online waiting for some entites to complain. b) if someone does complain and it's a valid complain, the content will be 'offlined', but still avail in their archive. The day it becomes 'legal', they'll put it back online. for old software, cf what they are doing for the Apple 2, where flux images of the disks are archived https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_apple_woz https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_apple_woz Old manuals are scanned too https://archive.org/details/savetz_stacks https://archive.org/details/savetz_stacks
  - sterwill 7y ago
    Thanks for the links. I'm a big fan of the Internet Archive. I browse their content regularly for fun, and have even contributed one old (1990s!) piece of software.
  - bane 7y ago
    The savetz_stacks are by Kevin Savetz, one of the hosts of the ANTIC Atari 8-bit podcast, which has had hundreds of incredible interviews with people from across the 8-bit computing industry. Totally worth listening to.