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I love retro computing and have used retro systems for contemporary work. This said, the VIC 20 has a horrendous font that I couldn't handle even back in the da

I love retro computing and have used retro systems for contemporary work. This said, the VIC 20 has a horrendous font that I couldn't handle even back in the day. I think DOS with the standard PC font is vastly superior for retro word processing (especially with WordPerfect!)

jaysonelliot 2y ago
Absolutely agree. There's a huge advantage to working on a pre-internet computer for word processing, in terms of being able to focus. But the VIC-20 screen is painful to look at. Personally, I use an Apple //e with WordStar.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
It's not like your work was going to look good on a 9 dots per inch matrix printer. Fonts were a feature printers had. Computers didn't have fonts then. They had a single, highly pixelated font built into the firmware. Which wasn't the same font your printer had. No bold. No Italic. No different sizes. Definitely no wysiwyg. Some printers had some of those features. Some even had more than one font. I had the commodore 64 which had a bit more memory than the VIC-20. But still, a few pages of text in ascii was about the max you could manage with that (a few thousand words at best). These things weren't that great for word processing. Also features like "saving" and tapes as the main storage medium made using them slightly risky.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago
  > It's not like your work was going to look good on a 9 dots per inch matrix printer. Hmmmm... I don't remember the exact matrix printer I had (some Epson probably) and it wasn't 8-bit but 16-bit era but I remember making very nice (for the time) D&D character sheets on the Amiga. Sure it wasn't a 1200 DPI laser printer but it was still cool. The Apple ImageWriter II was a 9-in dot-matrix printer and already allowed to print nice things.
  - WillAdams 2y ago
    Yes, but by manually managing the dots most like, and probably doing a second pass --- the default fonts on hardware were not that great aesthetically.
- robinsonb5 2y ago
  GEOS - and especially GeoWrite - on the Commodore 64 was a revelation. It was wysiwyg (albeit at fixed zoom) and used bitmap fonts which printed just about acceptably on my Citizen 120D 9-pin dot matrix. The only thing it couldn't do was shingling to increase the apparent resolution/density of the prints.
- glxxyz 2y ago
  It was 9 pin not 9dpi, yes it looked awful. 24-pin (2 rows of 12) was a pretty big improvement, even more noisy though.
- MisterTea 2y ago
  > Fonts were a feature printers had. I remember the Juki daisy wheel we had hooked to our AT&T PC6300 running the Q&A word processor. I think you could buy different type faces but my father only ever bought the standard typewriter font. The Citizen 200GX dot matrix we had afterward was a game changer especially with the color ribbon kit and the ability to print color graphics from paint in Win 3.1 was amazing. This makes me nostalgic for tractor feed paper - both of the above printers had the tractor feeder option. My father bought a friggin skid of tractor feed on the cheap in the 80's for home and business so for years we had infinite paper supply until lasers and ink jets did away with tractor feeding.
deleted 2y ago
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cmrdporcupine 2y ago
I used to word-process on the VIC for school assignments... and let me tell you the font was the least of my concerns... 20 column text was. Dear god. So awful.

jaysonelliot 2y ago

Absolutely agree. There's a huge advantage to working on a pre-internet computer for word processing, in terms of being able to focus. But the VIC-20 screen is painful to look at. Personally, I use an Apple //e with WordStar.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

It's not like your work was going to look good on a 9 dots per inch matrix printer. Fonts were a feature printers had. Computers didn't have fonts then. They had a single, highly pixelated font built into the firmware. Which wasn't the same font your printer had. No bold. No Italic. No different sizes. Definitely no wysiwyg. Some printers had some of those features. Some even had more than one font. I had the commodore 64 which had a bit more memory than the VIC-20. But still, a few pages of text in ascii was about the max you could manage with that (a few thousand words at best). These things weren't that great for word processing. Also features like "saving" and tapes as the main storage medium made using them slightly risky.

TacticalCoder 2y ago
> It's not like your work was going to look good on a 9 dots per inch matrix printer. Hmmmm... I don't remember the exact matrix printer I had (some Epson probably) and it wasn't 8-bit but 16-bit era but I remember making very nice (for the time) D&D character sheets on the Amiga. Sure it wasn't a 1200 DPI laser printer but it was still cool. The Apple ImageWriter II was a 9-in dot-matrix printer and already allowed to print nice things.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  Yes, but by manually managing the dots most like, and probably doing a second pass --- the default fonts on hardware were not that great aesthetically.
robinsonb5 2y ago
GEOS - and especially GeoWrite - on the Commodore 64 was a revelation. It was wysiwyg (albeit at fixed zoom) and used bitmap fonts which printed just about acceptably on my Citizen 120D 9-pin dot matrix. The only thing it couldn't do was shingling to increase the apparent resolution/density of the prints.
glxxyz 2y ago
It was 9 pin not 9dpi, yes it looked awful. 24-pin (2 rows of 12) was a pretty big improvement, even more noisy though.
MisterTea 2y ago
> Fonts were a feature printers had. I remember the Juki daisy wheel we had hooked to our AT&T PC6300 running the Q&A word processor. I think you could buy different type faces but my father only ever bought the standard typewriter font. The Citizen 200GX dot matrix we had afterward was a game changer especially with the color ribbon kit and the ability to print color graphics from paint in Win 3.1 was amazing. This makes me nostalgic for tractor feed paper - both of the above printers had the tractor feeder option. My father bought a friggin skid of tractor feed on the cheap in the 80's for home and business so for years we had infinite paper supply until lasers and ink jets did away with tractor feeding.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cmrdporcupine 2y ago

I used to word-process on the VIC for school assignments... and let me tell you the font was the least of my concerns... 20 column text was. Dear god. So awful.