When I got my second drive - and they were around $500 back then - I felt almost decadent. Being able to copy disks without swapping floppies, etc.
Oh, yeah. I disassembled a floppy drive on our Apple ][+ then couldn’t get it working again. My mother was not pleased with me.
Heh memories of trying to use Microsoft Word on a single-floppy Mac (original model) in college. Some functions like spell check needed a different floppy, but the machine had to constantly flip-flop that one with the one you had saved the document on. Much swapping ensued.
Even worse if happening on a whole computer lab worth of machines at once.
Worse again when students had changed all the Mac disk eject sounds to a puking Noise.
Heheh - word processors in “the old days” I wrote my Ph.D. thesis, a huge, thick book with a lot of complicated formulas and codes etc. in the text, using Word Perfect. I thought it was amazing to be able to do it on the computer and edit changes from professors directly, vs. write it in long hand, give it to a secretary to type up (and pay her of course) have her submit it to the profs then make changes in long hand, wash and repeat. Printed it on an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. Final version, of course, was typed by a department secretary on her IBM Selectric typewriter.
As advanced as Word Perfect was (I think that was the program) it was not WYSIWYG. I.e. to boldface you had to type in a boldface code (such as ) in front of the word you wanted to boldface and a boldface off code after the word or phrase (such as ) You had to do that for indenting, basically everything. But it was so much better than writing it by hand.
LOL and I just saw that I was entering codes that this forum recommends! LOL!
… and that was itself a big improvement over earlier apps like Wordstar where (if your printer wasn’t a specifically supported model) you had to know and enter your printer’s own specific escape codes for typographical changes.
Thank the gods that Word Perfect had printer driver add-ons so that it was standardized.
Diego
I loved WordPerfect. I still remember that control-F5 is the command for a hanging indent. I think my first WYSIWYG word processor was Final Copy for the Amiga.
I remember the battle between draft quality, near letter quality and letter quality. And which people would accept what.
Remember the WordPerfect shell? It has a feature that would dim the monitor after a number of minutes of inactivity. The place I did tech support in college, it was impossible to explain to the secretaries that when their screen went black, nothing has been deleted and all they had to do was press a key.
I vaguely remember the chasm you speak of but, it was not this huge puzzle for me. You see I had access to internet and the wonderful usnet forums. comp.sys.apple.games.adventure IIRC. So for the really hard stuff I cheated.
Where I really spent my time was in trying to defeat the copy protection for the games, a friend of my was true microcomputer pioneer, home brew computer club member, worked with Woz to make one of the earliest joysticks for the Apple II. The Apple II, floppy drive was one of Steve Wozniak early engineering wonders. To to save money in hardware, Woz made many disk drive functions software controllable. This in turn lead to elaborate copy protection schemes. My friend was really into hacking them and got me hooked also.
Ironically seven or eight year latter, I became friend with the president of the Software Publisher Association creators of the infamous don’t copy this floppy rap
I hated Wordperfect and it’s predecessor the Wang Word Processor. Trying to use those after working at VisiCorp where we had VisiOn Word and then getting one of the earliest Mac with MacWrite was so painful.
WordPerfect was great in the pre-WYSIWYG days, yeah, but once you tried something like MacWrite it was hard to go back. Unfortunately, MacWrite had limited features and couldn’t handle huge files, so sometimes you had to go back even if you hated it.
I’m expecting a LaTeX fan to pop in & tell us we’re wrong any second now :-)
Diego