5 ms·
My favorite editor of all time was “Leading Edge Word Processor” which was a lightening fast piece of word processing software for DOS w/ all the trimmings that
by zxcvbn4038 6y ago
My favorite editor of all time was “Leading Edge Word Processor” which was a lightening fast piece of word processing software for DOS w/ all the trimmings that comfortably fit in a floppy disk with ample room for documents. The company that made it “Leading Edge” was primarily a PC clone vendor and all their software disappeared overnight when they were acquired by another clone maker and their entire brand winked out.
For writing batch scripts and reading large text files I would use a utility called sled “slick little editor”. That was some hand coded assembly language program that was only a couple kilobytes but could do most of what vi does and work with anything that fit into memory. It seems to have completely disappeared from history.
Wordstar was big in school - first half of class was always everyone passing around the DOS and Wordstar disks to boot their computers. Great way to start your day or wind down, really sucked at lunch because you were hungry and nothing to do but watching the second hand spin while everyone was booting up.
- ubermonkey 6y agoOH MY GOD I remember LEWP, but my nostalgia here is fundamentally grounded in its instability. See, I kept myself in beer money by helping a few grad students recover LEWP documents that LEWP had obligingly munged badly. Great tool -- for people who charge money to fix it when it breaks!
- zxcvbn4038 6y agoI remember there was a master index file which implemented a sort of virtual filesystem allowing long document names w/ spaces. If that got corrupted it was a bad thing - only happened once but I lost an evening of work. Otherwise it never gave me any problems. I remember that document recovery used to be a big thing so I guess a lot of programs had issues - or maybe it was just the technology at the time was less reliable. I remember one of my school teachers seemed to think that inserting a floppy disk required you to slam it in with as much force as possible, and she could never understand why the disks stopped working [point to crease in media, point to abrasion on media, point to tear in jacket] -- complete mystery, can't have been anything she was doing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- ubermonkey 6y agoIt was something about LEWP's goofy virtual filesystem, absolutely. Contemporary tech was really stable when crappy developers didn't get overcute. I made literally thousands of dollars solving issues with LEWP among a cohort of grad students between 1990 and 1992. I was never called upon to do similar magic for anyone who used a more serious and less idiosyncratic tool (at my university, Word was the mainstream option).
- pseingatl 6y agoWasn't LEWP a Multimate clone? And wasn't Multimate itself a Wang word processor clone?
- Narishma 6y agoThey didn't disappear from history, nothing on the internet really does. You can still download those editors and run them on an emulator or VM: https://winworldpc.com/product/leading-edge-word-processing/1x https://winworldpc.com/product/leading-edge-word-processing/... http://www.wilmott.ca/sled.html http://www.wilmott.ca/sled.html