This article (saw it somewhere years ago) was a large influence on my emacs config. Because of it I discovered emacs' secondary selection feature, which I use all the time now.
If you're like me and grew up using pseudo-Wordstar keybindings (me by way of Turbo Pascal and Turbo C) you may appreciate JOE: https://github.com/joe-editor/joe
I grew up using WordStar on the Apple ][. It was great when all you had was an 80 column card, a green phosphor screen and a keyboard, but I was never sad to leave it behind when GUIs were invented. I have nostalgia for the time, sure, but not for that interface and the multi-key-stroke commands you had to learn by rote.
Each to their own, and of course finding an optimal writing environment is a very subjective thing -- but it's not like there aren't modern distraction-free writing interfaces that exist.
GUIs were invented by the Xerox PARC team early 1970s, the IIc (I have one sitting on my desk :) was 1984. Totally beside your point so I apologize. I only mention it because PARC deserves a huge amount of credit.
In the UK at least it crops up a lot in legal circles.
Quite often solicitors have stuff on 3.5" or even 5.25" floppies that need read, converted from WordPerfect into something modern, and delivered as maybe a PDF or Word Doc.
Fortunately, solicitors tend not to be short of money (that they bill their client for) so they can often find "a guy who knows a guy" who can get that precious floppy onto a USB stick. Occasionally I am the guy who the guy knows, and it buys me the odd case of reasonably-priced wine.
Out of curiosity, what kind of documents are those typically? Surely UK businesses don't need to keep financial records for 40+ years (or however long it's been since floppies were common)?
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in fiction, and many others in reality, such as the UK PPI scandal, the Maxwell pensioners, and (US) all the malpractice cases like Vioxx and asbestos...
I still like to start the first draft of anything substantial by moving to a single screen, opening FreeDOS, maximizing the window, and typing in Wordstar as if it were 1987. Hell, sometimes I'll even put on a nylon windbreaker.
I always preferred WordStar to WordPerfect, largely because WordStar's keybindings were easy to learn and remember. WordPerfect, by contrast, seemed to require keyboard templates, a manual, a cheat sheet, and a certain amount of divine intervention.
I learned to love WordPerfect. I still miss the ability to "Reveal Codes" and see exactly where it had placed the non-printing codes to turn on/off bold, italics, to change margins, etc. When MS Word screws your entire document's formatting by typing a single letter, or moves stuff around the page seemingly randomly, your only option is to undo or reload the document.
You can read an insider's story of WordPerfect by Pete Peterson, one of the earliest WordPerfect employees. The PDF version is freely available on his website (https://wepeterson.com/almostperfect/).
Wow, I'd completely forgotten Peterson's book existed. Thanks for the link.
My long-running quarrel with WordPerfect was always the keybindings. I can still tear through WordStar, and anything wearing WordStar's clothes, like Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, or Joe in jstar mode, like an overcaffeinated chipmunk that's made a series of questionable but deeply committed life choices about caffeine.
WordPerfect, though. WordPerfect and I never achieved détente. I never managed to internalize those key combinations. This is, on paper, a personal failing. In practice, I continue to hold WordPerfect entirely responsible.
Story time. In college 40+ years ago my housemate wanted to impress
this girl by inviting her to write an important paper of hers with a
looming deadline on his computer with WordStar instead of her usual
methodology involving a typewriter. She was using WordStar comfortably
in less than five minutes but being completely new to it was unaware
of the practice of periodically saving one's work. Around three in the
morning it crashed and took all of her work with it. I was told she
burst into tears and had left when I woke up the next morning to find
my housemate busily trying to retype it from her handwritten notes.
Indeed. In high school we had a Mac (Performa?) lab running System 7 in the art department. The whole system would crash so constantly that I would manually save my work almost after every change. Really stunk when Netscape Navigator 3 crashed, because you couldn’t save your work there.
These programs are great for sitting down and writing with no distractions, but if you have a setup with directories full of word docs, text files, various graphics, even excel sheets all related to what you are working on that you need to refer to and cross-reference, they are less useful than an older version of Word or OpenOffice/LibreOffice. And they are difficult to export, share... there's a reason we don't use typewriters anymore, or DOS programs whose output is confined within a single program.
That looks like a different type of writing, perhaps research or business writing. Wordstar like editors that bring simplicity and a distraction free environment are best suited for creative writing.
I've found trying to find a distraction-free editor a distraction in itself. I'd bet money that most authors using an old word processor had some external reason to use it (cost, availability, editor compatability) and just stuck with what they know.
GRRM could use clay tablet and it wouldn't make any difference on his output.
If you want output, Stephen King has used many processors, he doesn't care aparently as long as he can focus. Brandon Sanderson uses Word. The tool doesn't seem to matter.
After reviewing a few options I think "Just print it out" is still the best choice for long term archival. The density is not high however the hardware requirements being just one mark 1 eyeball(hardware that self replicates and has been stable for millions of years) makes it the clear winner in almost every case.
Interesting that the guy who wrote the article is an award-winning science fiction writer and also the author of FlashForward. They even made a TV series based on it.
If you use a machine with an ISA slot, you can get a card with a chip called CH375 or CH376, which deploys a USB flash drive like a normal hard disc with either a loadable driver or option BIOS ROM. You can just pull out the entire drive and mount it on a normal Windows or Linux box.
I think the below-mentioned Pocket 376 might have one soldered-on already.
I've had similar thoughts and ended up going with FreeBSD and no network connection for my use case. It's been great. It gives you some of the expected terminal ergonomics (and USB support) without the distractions.
- copy om.tmac to /usr/share/groff/current/tmac/om.tmac
- cd to examples/ directory and do some tests:
pdfmom -step -k mom-pdf.mom > mom-pdf.pdf
WIth jstar+groff+mom you can get something basically perfect.
"-step -k" it's just "-s -t -e -p -k", a bunch of options to enforce UTF-8,
some proper handing and whatnot.
Just a footnote to parent post: Groff is developed as a complete set of programs and macro files. Debian, hence Ubuntu and other derivative distros, segment groff into a base package with what you need to display man pages (using the man macros) that comes as part of a base install and an additional package that has the mom macros and all. Just 'apt install groff' to get the full groff distribution.
He could have finished the series long before the Game of Thrones adaptation was in full swing, much less the general availability of LLMs. I think the HBO money made him care a lot less about ASoIaF mainline and went back to editing Wild Cards and other projects.
LLMs are really bad at worldbuilding outside of tropes. They're great at coming up with on the fly setpieces etc. halfway through a session, but for novel concepts they really dont work that well
I fondly remember writing, mostly poetry, with wordstar on my first portable, the kaypro. I still have all the files. I believe it was CPM under the hood...
I started getting into typewriters. I could've repurposed an old X230 and disable/remove the network card physically. But I also wanted to stop staring at a screen when writing, so I gave the typewriter a try.
It's still early and I'm struggling to write more than a few lines at a time.
Not surprising from how I've been commenting "witty" one-liners in comment threads for over a decade.
I expect being able to write long-form with no backspacing will need a lot of time to learn.
But I want to take back my attention. If there's one thing I've learned in the last decade, is that one's attention is a precious resource and it's time to be more deliberate in how I spend it.
Reaching back decades, I used to do a first draft longhand on file paper, cross bits out, rewrite bits. Then bang it out on a typewriter. Then once over with a red pen the next day, and a complete re-type.
I'm not sure that I could work that way now, but it was more deliberate. Less 'drive by' thought.
"Our Writing Tools Are Also Working on Our Thoughts"
(I'm talking essays for University here not deathless prose).
I got back to writing longer texts by mentally separating writing and editing. When writing, just write. Even when you think the paragraph could be better, keep on writing.
Only start editing when a substantial piece is ready. Clean up some wording, rewrite a paragraph or two.
Even then, don't overdo it. There is always something to improve, you'll never be done that way. Good enough is good enough, hit publish and go on write the next thing.
Attention is like a limited amount, you start the day with 100 tokens, scrolling tick-tock for an hour? 25 tokens, deep working for an hour? 25 tokens - what do you have left to do and how many tokens does it take?
I’m trying more and more to not spend tokens on things that don’t help (social media), etc.
The later version of Wordstar had a style template system which I thought was nice. So where Word Perfect had tags and more tags. Wordstar you just applied a predefined style to a block of text. I think somewhat like CSS.
This article (saw it somewhere years ago) was a large influence on my emacs config. Because of it I discovered emacs' secondary selection feature, which I use all the time now.
If you're like me and grew up using pseudo-Wordstar keybindings (me by way of Turbo Pascal and Turbo C) you may appreciate JOE: https://github.com/joe-editor/joe
I grew up using WordStar on the Apple ][. It was great when all you had was an 80 column card, a green phosphor screen and a keyboard, but I was never sad to leave it behind when GUIs were invented. I have nostalgia for the time, sure, but not for that interface and the multi-key-stroke commands you had to learn by rote.
Each to their own, and of course finding an optimal writing environment is a very subjective thing -- but it's not like there aren't modern distraction-free writing interfaces that exist.
I remember being quite excited at moving from a DOS based word processor (Word Perfect) to a GUI based one (Word). It looked like a step up.
In retrospect the quality, quantity and look and feel of the documents I created remained exactly the same.
> a green phosphor screen
In the spirit of emacs-v-vim, I have to come down in favor of that other phosphor color of those days, amber. Better contrast !!!
> leave it behind when GUIs were invented
GUIs were invented by the Xerox PARC team early 1970s, the IIc (I have one sitting on my desk :) was 1984. Totally beside your point so I apologize. I only mention it because PARC deserves a huge amount of credit.
In the same way as WordStar, there's a community of DOS WordPerfect 6.0 users who claim with some validity that it's still the best for writing prose
That would be 5.1. The 6.0 graphic mode just gets in the way.
In the UK at least it crops up a lot in legal circles.
Quite often solicitors have stuff on 3.5" or even 5.25" floppies that need read, converted from WordPerfect into something modern, and delivered as maybe a PDF or Word Doc.
Fortunately, solicitors tend not to be short of money (that they bill their client for) so they can often find "a guy who knows a guy" who can get that precious floppy onto a USB stick. Occasionally I am the guy who the guy knows, and it buys me the odd case of reasonably-priced wine.
Out of curiosity, what kind of documents are those typically? Surely UK businesses don't need to keep financial records for 40+ years (or however long it's been since floppies were common)?
Legal matters often have decades long histories. Especially things like deceased estates.
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in fiction, and many others in reality, such as the UK PPI scandal, the Maxwell pensioners, and (US) all the malpractice cases like Vioxx and asbestos...
I still like to start the first draft of anything substantial by moving to a single screen, opening FreeDOS, maximizing the window, and typing in Wordstar as if it were 1987. Hell, sometimes I'll even put on a nylon windbreaker.
I always preferred WordStar to WordPerfect, largely because WordStar's keybindings were easy to learn and remember. WordPerfect, by contrast, seemed to require keyboard templates, a manual, a cheat sheet, and a certain amount of divine intervention.
I learned to love WordPerfect. I still miss the ability to "Reveal Codes" and see exactly where it had placed the non-printing codes to turn on/off bold, italics, to change margins, etc. When MS Word screws your entire document's formatting by typing a single letter, or moves stuff around the page seemingly randomly, your only option is to undo or reload the document.
You can read an insider's story of WordPerfect by Pete Peterson, one of the earliest WordPerfect employees. The PDF version is freely available on his website (https://wepeterson.com/almostperfect/).
Wow, I'd completely forgotten Peterson's book existed. Thanks for the link.
My long-running quarrel with WordPerfect was always the keybindings. I can still tear through WordStar, and anything wearing WordStar's clothes, like Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, or Joe in jstar mode, like an overcaffeinated chipmunk that's made a series of questionable but deeply committed life choices about caffeine.
WordPerfect, though. WordPerfect and I never achieved détente. I never managed to internalize those key combinations. This is, on paper, a personal failing. In practice, I continue to hold WordPerfect entirely responsible.
Didn't MS Word have Reveal Codes ? At least for some years ? I doubt it is (or was ever) in Mac Pages.
Yes, around the Word 6 era. It also had a plain-blue-screen mode for the real WP diehards.
> WordPerfect, by contrast, seemed to require keyboard templates, a manual, a cheat sheet, and a certain amount of divine intervention.
I do recall WordPerfect masters being revered, if not more highly compensated, by the average duffer.
Yes, and most of them were lawyers or worked for law firms.
Story time. In college 40+ years ago my housemate wanted to impress this girl by inviting her to write an important paper of hers with a looming deadline on his computer with WordStar instead of her usual methodology involving a typewriter. She was using WordStar comfortably in less than five minutes but being completely new to it was unaware of the practice of periodically saving one's work. Around three in the morning it crashed and took all of her work with it. I was told she burst into tears and had left when I woke up the next morning to find my housemate busily trying to retype it from her handwritten notes.
The housemate did poor job introducing to computer work. "Thou shall save your work often" was the first rule in those glorious times.
Indeed. In high school we had a Mac (Performa?) lab running System 7 in the art department. The whole system would crash so constantly that I would manually save my work almost after every change. Really stunk when Netscape Navigator 3 crashed, because you couldn’t save your work there.
These programs are great for sitting down and writing with no distractions, but if you have a setup with directories full of word docs, text files, various graphics, even excel sheets all related to what you are working on that you need to refer to and cross-reference, they are less useful than an older version of Word or OpenOffice/LibreOffice. And they are difficult to export, share... there's a reason we don't use typewriters anymore, or DOS programs whose output is confined within a single program.
That looks like a different type of writing, perhaps research or business writing. Wordstar like editors that bring simplicity and a distraction free environment are best suited for creative writing.
I've found trying to find a distraction-free editor a distraction in itself. I'd bet money that most authors using an old word processor had some external reason to use it (cost, availability, editor compatability) and just stuck with what they know.
A large fantasy adventure could easily have supporting documents with cities stats, characters, races, maps etc.
It could have, but George R R Martin famously uses Word Star and he surely has all that.
Then again he's also about a decade late with the next book
GRRM could use clay tablet and it wouldn't make any difference on his output.
If you want output, Stephen King has used many processors, he doesn't care aparently as long as he can focus. Brandon Sanderson uses Word. The tool doesn't seem to matter.
My point exactly; sci-fi you even more need to refer to accurate statistics whatever they may be.
Unless the fleet travels at the speed of plot.
Back then we were far less shy about printing things.
After reviewing a few options I think "Just print it out" is still the best choice for long term archival. The density is not high however the hardware requirements being just one mark 1 eyeball(hardware that self replicates and has been stable for millions of years) makes it the clear winner in almost every case.
DoD approves this idea
(Recall the literal warehouses of papers related to projects in Kelly's book and Rich's memoir)
Interesting that the guy who wrote the article is an award-winning science fiction writer and also the author of FlashForward. They even made a TV series based on it.
https://wordtsar.ca/
I've long considered getting a netbook, slapping freedos on it and running WordStar or WordPerfect as a writing deck.
I'm not sure how I would get my files I create off the device since USB support isn't really a thing.
https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos
"To get your work off the key, just insert the key into a computer that's already running any more modern OS than DOS."
This looks like a winner, thx!
If you use a machine with an ISA slot, you can get a card with a chip called CH375 or CH376, which deploys a USB flash drive like a normal hard disc with either a loadable driver or option BIOS ROM. You can just pull out the entire drive and mount it on a normal Windows or Linux box.
I think the below-mentioned Pocket 376 might have one soldered-on already.
I thought freedos could use usb? Get something with built in ethernet or serial and you can transfer that way pretty easy too.
Or just run joe as jstar and close enough, maybe? I use joe for mostly everything, but I never used WordStar (well, I ran into it once)
Just use any linux or bsd on a second hand netbook or laptop, install joe editor package, disable graphical desktop and boot to console only. Done.
https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/
I've had similar thoughts and ended up going with FreeBSD and no network connection for my use case. It's been great. It gives you some of the expected terminal ergonomics (and USB support) without the distractions.
It should run fine under dosemu with a minimal console only Linux.
Apparently the right combination of BIOS and FreeDOS gives you somewhat easy USB support: https://superuser.com/questions/740474/how-to-access-a-usb-s...
Something like the Pocket 386 but with a regular size keyboard could be the perfect device for this purpose.
If you want just load the dos net ios/smb stack (or a tcp stack) and go to town.
USB floppy drive on the modern computer side. I do this for old machines.
Hyperbola GNU/Linux and Wordgrinder or jstar (from the Joe package) and Markdown, or even Groff as the basic syntax can be easy enough. Then you run
And you can now enjoy a formated book in the spot.If any, check Groff with Mom macros, with does what you need with ease:
https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/
Online manual:
https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/momdoc/toc.html
For a quick command:
In order to get the last version:- Install groff in Hyperbola GNU/Linux (or any other) if is not installed. It's mandatory in a 99% of distros but not Hyperbola.
- get https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-2.6_d.tar.gz
- uncompress it
- copy om.tmac to /usr/share/groff/current/tmac/om.tmac
- cd to examples/ directory and do some tests:
WIth jstar+groff+mom you can get something basically perfect. "-step -k" it's just "-s -t -e -p -k", a bunch of options to enforce UTF-8, some proper handing and whatnot.Just a footnote to parent post: Groff is developed as a complete set of programs and macro files. Debian, hence Ubuntu and other derivative distros, segment groff into a base package with what you need to display man pages (using the man macros) that comes as part of a base install and an additional package that has the mom macros and all. Just 'apt install groff' to get the full groff distribution.
CF card. Pop the card out, read it on the PC.
Followed the UCSD p-system of putting command prompts on screen. Useful but also irritating to attention and screen real estate.
Usefully showing end-of-line markers. I remember thinking compared to dec-10 ROFF (which iirc proceeded nroff etc) it was both simpler and harder.
Used it, never liked it. Ed was the way.
I believe George R. R. Martin uses wordstar to write his books. I still hold a little hope that he will finish A Song of Ice and Fire series.
Maybe he hasn't finished it because he can't run WordStar anymore.
I think he is busy making sure AI doesn't finish it first. Can't have AIs trample in his fantasy land.
He could have finished the series long before the Game of Thrones adaptation was in full swing, much less the general availability of LLMs. I think the HBO money made him care a lot less about ASoIaF mainline and went back to editing Wild Cards and other projects.
LLMs are really bad at worldbuilding outside of tropes. They're great at coming up with on the fly setpieces etc. halfway through a session, but for novel concepts they really dont work that well
I fondly remember writing, mostly poetry, with wordstar on my first portable, the kaypro. I still have all the files. I believe it was CPM under the hood...
Using its text mode, WordStar made a pretty good programming editor.
Side topic, but that website is awesome.
I still have memories of having to install Wordstar 2000 on 5 1/4" floppies. I think it was like 20 discs and painfully slow.
I started getting into typewriters. I could've repurposed an old X230 and disable/remove the network card physically. But I also wanted to stop staring at a screen when writing, so I gave the typewriter a try.
It's still early and I'm struggling to write more than a few lines at a time. Not surprising from how I've been commenting "witty" one-liners in comment threads for over a decade. I expect being able to write long-form with no backspacing will need a lot of time to learn.
But I want to take back my attention. If there's one thing I've learned in the last decade, is that one's attention is a precious resource and it's time to be more deliberate in how I spend it.
Reaching back decades, I used to do a first draft longhand on file paper, cross bits out, rewrite bits. Then bang it out on a typewriter. Then once over with a red pen the next day, and a complete re-type.
I'm not sure that I could work that way now, but it was more deliberate. Less 'drive by' thought.
"Our Writing Tools Are Also Working on Our Thoughts"
(I'm talking essays for University here not deathless prose).
I got back to writing longer texts by mentally separating writing and editing. When writing, just write. Even when you think the paragraph could be better, keep on writing.
Only start editing when a substantial piece is ready. Clean up some wording, rewrite a paragraph or two.
Even then, don't overdo it. There is always something to improve, you'll never be done that way. Good enough is good enough, hit publish and go on write the next thing.
Attention is like a limited amount, you start the day with 100 tokens, scrolling tick-tock for an hour? 25 tokens, deep working for an hour? 25 tokens - what do you have left to do and how many tokens does it take?
I’m trying more and more to not spend tokens on things that don’t help (social media), etc.
The later version of Wordstar had a style template system which I thought was nice. So where Word Perfect had tags and more tags. Wordstar you just applied a predefined style to a block of text. I think somewhat like CSS.