[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

This brings back memories and things have certainly changed. In the 1980s I used to use 8 inch diskettes on my CPT system (a dedicated word processor). It had two 8 inch drives, one for the program disk and the other for the data disk.

I never dealt with CPT gear, but I remember the existence of things like it, Lanier, Wang, Vydek, and IBM Displaywriters.

A bank I once worked for was grimly amusing. At one point, they decided to upgrade the secretaries, who had been using IBM Selectric typewriters. They realized they needed Vydek gear, but bought Qyx intelligent typewriters instead because those were within the signing authority of the VP of the area doing it. Buying the Vydek kit would have required kicking things up to the next level of management, and they didn't want to do that.

The small systems manager put up word processing on one of his PDP systems, and users discovered the systems also had games, so I'd get "official" support questions, like "How do I get the bucket to rise to the top of the well in Dungeon?"

And at one point, an officer deliberately bought his secretary a WP system incompatible with anything else in use, so she couldn't be asked to work on other people's projects.

Shortly thereafter, the IBM PC began taking over, producubng an entirely different set of issues.

One nice thing about the screen was that it was a 50-line paper-white screen, giving it the look of a sheet of typing paper. The typewriter analogy was enhanced by the way the cursor worked, you typed on a one line and the rest of the text moved up (much like with paper in a typewriter).

I've seen monitors like that. I've also seen WP systems that were not full screen editors. Only the selected line could be edited, though they could display more than one line.

Due to the limitations of the system I had to choose between available features. For example, I could have cut-and-paste, or justified printing (but not at the same time). To change from one feature to another I had to reload the system's program disk.

Things were on overlays, and you had to load the overlay from the program disk? Sounds like the old CP/M word processing systems. With a whole 64K (if that - some had 48K) of memory to hold OS, program, and data being worked on, you pretty much had to adopt that approach.

I logged some time on a Commodore 64, and one of the better word processors for it had an odd quirk: it did not auto format as you typed. The text would wrap whenever it hit the right edge of the screen, even if it was in the middle of a word. To see things properly, you had to switch to a preview mode, but you couldn't edit while in preview.

I had to save each page of a document as a separate file, and could save about 100 pages on a disk. Moving text from one page from another involved merging to pages together and saving them.

As I said, things have certainly changed.

Much to our collective relief.
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Dennis