Yea, but who remembers WordStar, & VisiCalc?

Yakima 728
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Yep, remember it well. It was said that Lotus 123 was written entirely in assembly language (ouch!). This would make it VERY hard to port to another machine.

Never used wordstar, but I was a diehard wordperfect user until Windows 3 came along and I switched to Word (and WYSIWYG, haha, remember that term when it meant something novel?)
 
Wow. I only ever used assembly in college and then as subroutine to program VESA modes to make shaded images of golf ball dimple patterns when I worked at Spalding Sports. Funniest thing I remember about assembly language was an early meme on shooting yourself in the foot in different computer languages when "object oriented" was exploding on the scene.

God I'm old.
 
I remember Lotus (esprie turbo, for the amiga) AND 123...


And my first OS was GeoWorks Ensemble! (damn i hated that GUI!)

but i'm just a whipper snapper, and was only 14-15 at the time.... :mug:


edit: and who remembers 4DOS?
 
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4DOS and DR-DOS.

Heck, I remember looking at PC DOS in assembly when the whole dang OS was about 30K. Sigh. Those were the days.
 
passedpawn said:
Yep, remember it well. It was said that Lotus 123 was written entirely in assembly language (ouch!). This would make it VERY hard to port to another machine.

Never used wordstar, but I was a diehard wordperfect user until Windows 3 came along and I switched to Word (and WYSIWYG, haha, remember that term when it meant something novel?)
Click to expand...
"Assembly language" ??!!??

I just had an attack of PTSD. Thank God for WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get").
 
Brooothru said:
"Assembly language" ??!!??

I just had an attack of PTSD. Thank God for WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get").
Click to expand...

Hah. Yep. Keying in the instructions on the front of a PDP10, with just enough code to turn on and read/load/run the more voluminous code on a piece of startup tape through the tape reader (hi tech because finally not punch paper tape), in order to get to a starting point where a rudimentary OS could then be loaded.

Make one keying mistake and all hell breaks loose. Typically followed by pulling the massive (physically) sized memory card with an unbelievably HUGE amount of memory, like maybe even 2K, and running a pencil eraser across the contacts to get to work better.

And you try to tell the kids how it was in the old days, and they don't believe ya.
 
I remember using WordPerfect a lot, as that was the de facto word processing app used in the legal profession at the time, despite most everyone else using MS-Word.

WP was easier to create documents in outline, which was the format of much of the docs we drafted (the bullets, indents, footnotes, etc., stayed where you wanted them). Word tended to move stuff around unless you turned off a bunch of default settings.
 
Yep, wordstar, Lotus 123 was the most common spreadsheet package and Word Perfect was either loved or hated.

I started with a CPM machine a Kaypro 2 with 64k of memory, with two 360k double sided floppy disk drives.
One of the original portable computers, it was the size of a portable sewing machine and weighed about as much.
I remember the sales person saying "It has 64K of memory, all the memory you will ever need."

I also had a 9-pin printer. And a bit later got a 300 baud manual dial modem, it didn't need an acoustic coupler, one would dial the number on the phone and when you heard the whistle, flip a switch on the modem and hang up the phone, then tap the enter key a couple of times and would get a login prompt to a BBS.
 
Yeah, I too love WP! Still do.

Having its own macro language (it's C-like), still makes it the most powerful word processor ever built, IMO.
Over the years I've written 100,000s of lines of WP macro code, up till 2013. Customized keyboards, menus, UI buttons, invoking other programs from within, importing databases, creating batches of 1000's of PDFs in Acrobat Server, virtually limitless and flawless.

I simply hate M$ Word... a necessary evil. As in many cases, the best didn't win here either...

Never toyed much with 123, half my job was word processor oriented.

Before PCs became common office good, we had a Lanier/AES dedicated console word processor with 8 terminals. This was state of the art, then, word processing-wise. It had a whopping 64MB of centralized hard disk space. Backups of that took 1.5 hours, every morning, on 16MB pizza sized hard platter cartridges.
 
1653581070010.png
 
Dr_Jeff said:
Yep, wordstar, Lotus 123 was the most common spreadsheet package and Word Perfect was either loved or hated.

I started with a CPM machine a Kaypro 2 with 64k of memory, with two 360k double sided floppy disk drives.
One of the original portable computers, it was the size of a portable sewing machine and weighed about as much.
I remember the sales person saying "It has 64K of memory, all the memory you will ever need."

I also had a 9-pin printer. And a bit later got a 300 baud manual dial modem, it didn't need an acoustic coupler, one would dial the number on the phone and when you heard the whistle, flip a switch on the modem and hang up the phone, then tap the enter key a couple of times and would get a login prompt to a BBS.
Click to expand...
Wow! You're makin' me all misty-eyed and nostalgic. Or NOT....

I felt like I was really chopping tall cotton when I ditched the acoustic coupler and got 300 baud. My AOL account was never the same. Had to pop for a P/S-2 from IBM with a 20 Meg hard drive and 2K of RAM!!!

Who could ever NEED that much power? I did worry for quite some time that there was only ONE floppy drive, but at least it held 750K of backup. Who'd ever use 1.4MB on a floppy?
 
Mmmm, VC on the classic Apple II. Then AppleWorks.

The first versions of 1-2-3 were alot faster, tho mostly due to the PC hardware it ran on, including more RAM.

Speaking of PTSD, how about futzing with the AutoEXEC.bat and Config.sys files to make the most of that Expanded (EMS) memory that Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft dreamed up to get past 640k?
 
matt_m said:
I used 123 on DOS just a little early in college but Quattro Pro came on strong and was the de facto standard by the time I graduated with Excel emerging.
Click to expand...

I seem to recall Quattro Pro being one of the first spreadsheet programs to take full advantage of math co-processors.

Those things really made a difference with 8088 and 286 processors, especially with AutoCAD (watching the space shuttle wireframe stock drawing re-render with the co-pro on/off was a real eye-opener).

Granted it was a moot point by the time 486DX chips were coming out in 1989...
 
renstyle said:
I seem to recall Quattro Pro being one of the first spreadsheet programs to take full advantage of math co-processors.

Those things really made a difference with 8088 and 286 processors, especially with AutoCAD (watching the space shuttle wireframe stock drawing re-render with the co-pro on/off was a real eye-opener).

Granted it was a moot point by the time 486DX chips were coming out in 1989...
Click to expand...

And then the Pentium ("586") would introduce the infamous floating point bug into the processor hardware. It actually affected almost no one, but intel handled it badly and had to issue a recall of the processor.
 
passedpawn said:
And then the Pentium ("586") would introduce the infamous floating point bug into the processor hardware. It actually affected almost no one, but intel handled it badly and had to issue a recall of the processor.
Click to expand...

I still have a 60Mhz Pentium with that bug! It runs at the full 5 volts so it's quite a good room warmer LOL!

Honestly I didn't know during the time I was running Windows on it, but my first boot of Linux and it was right there in the message log.
 
renstyle said:
Mmmm, VC on the classic Apple II. Then AppleWorks.

The first versions of 1-2-3 were alot faster, tho mostly due to the PC hardware it ran on, including more RAM.

Speaking of PTSD, how about futzing with the AutoEXEC.bat and Config.sys files to make the most of that Expanded (EMS) memory that Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft dreamed up to get past 640k?
Click to expand...
More than 640K of RAM? That's just silly talk!

And you ALWAYS had to have current autoEXEC.bat and config.sys files on an emergency boot disk.

How I long for the days of AM radio, doing points & plugs and oil changes every 2,000 miles, and "gas wars" meaning you could 'fill 'er up' for less than $5.00 of ethyl.

On second thought, scratch everything except the $.20 per gallon fuel. On our last trip we paid over $130 twice (22 gallons each time) to fill The Zephyr with diesel ⛽️ . Ouch!
 
Man, is it good or bad that I know what points are? Or ethyl 🤣 By the time I rolled around in the late 70s it was just "regular" next to "unleaded".

More than a few times padre filled up the '79 K5 blazer with Regular, even tho it CLEARLY stated "Unleaded Fuel only". I'm sure the fumes slowed us all down a bit cognitively, so I'm glad the lead is (mostly) gone.

Wish that price would have stuck around tho!
 
fwiw, back in the stone age of IBM mainframe implementation I had to write system diagnostics in machine language - a lower level than assembly which is essentially a symbolic construct. I carried around a suitcase full of card decks to test things like ALUs, instruction decoders, memory, storage protection arrays, etc.

Looking back at some of the stuff we literally depended on working seems borderline insane to me now. Woof!

Cheers!
 
day_trippr said:
fwiw, back in the stone age of IBM mainframe implementation I had to write system diagnostics in machine language - a lower level than assembly which is essentially a symbolic construct. I carried around a suitcase full of card decks to test things like ALUs, instruction decoders, memory, storage protection arrays, etc.

Looking back at some of the stuff we literally depended on working seems borderline insane to me now. Woof!

Cheers!
Click to expand...
machine code is no different, line by line, than assembly. It's a harder way of doing it, but line-by-line it's identical to assembly.
 
day_trippr said:
fwiw, back in the stone age of IBM mainframe implementation I had to write system diagnostics in machine language - a lower level than assembly which is essentially a symbolic construct. I carried around a suitcase full of card decks to test things like ALUs, instruction decoders, memory, storage protection arrays, etc.

Looking back at some of the stuff we literally depended on working seems borderline insane to me now. Woof!

Cheers!
Click to expand...
Agreed, mainframe computers, below the published 'machine language', seem boardline insane.

"Macro" assembly languages (assembly with macro substitution) take boarderline insane in a different direction. With the right set of macros, one can write "structured" assembly language (no gotos jump instructions). And yes, a line of text in a macro assembler would generate zero or more machine instructions.
 
day_trippr said:
fwiw, back in the stone age of IBM mainframe implementation I had to write system diagnostics in machine language - a lower level than assembly which is essentially a symbolic construct. I carried around a suitcase full of card decks to test things like ALUs, instruction decoders, memory, storage protection arrays, etc.

Looking back at some of the stuff we literally depended on working seems borderline insane to me now. Woof!

Cheers!
Click to expand...

Wild eh? Back when computers were actually repairable, and required ALOT more mechanical expertise than nowadays.

Your COBOL code better be lined up in the correct columns before you run that job!

These were the days when a pocket calculator got folks to the moon (computation-wise), and bugs actually had wings 🤣

1653738163563.png
 
I remember in high school having to do a unit on slide rules before we even started trig. Not sure exactly why. Calc in college used them, but we were allowed to use the very rudimentary digital calculators (circa 1968) if we were fortunate enough to have access to one. Moot point since no one did actually have access.

I never understood the reason, other than esoteric, for using one until I started flying and was introduced to the ubiquitous E-6B circular slide rule for solving time, distance and wind vector problems, among other computations. Then the logic fell into place, as well as the necessity for accuracy.

Young whippersnappers today don't know what they're missing. Lucky them!
 
I typed up quite a few school reports in Bank Street Writer on my Commodore. I don't think I ever used word perfect. I remember being really impressed with MS Word when we finally got that with the WYSIWYG formatting.
 
My computer history doesn't go back QUITE as far as y'all, but I feel fortunate to have seen as much of it as I have.

Started with the Commodore 64 when I was 5. Outside of myself and my best friend writing silly "hello world" programs in BASIC, it was mostly used for playing games. At 7, my parents got an IBM XT. I learned a lot about computers and between that and their next computer (about 6 years later). I recall WordPerfect, and them paying me to input their receipts to calculate their sales tax paid in prep for them to do their taxes. I also became very familiar with DOS.

As we approached the "modern" era, by which I mean 486, they bought a computer when I was about 13 and at that point I became the IT administrator for the house. I wrote a batch file menuing system so my dad could figure out how to get to programs he wanted to use, eventually pissed him off because about every time he got familiar with an OS I'd change it... DOS w/ Windows 3.1 to OS/2 2.1 to Win95 to OS/2 Warp, was the progression IIRC? At that point I also got into the BBS world and ran my own BBS--probably not the only 15 year old in the world to have his own BBS at the time lol.

In high school I took a programming class. The first day I realized it was a joke. It was pretty much "here's a 'for loop', now practice this for the next three weeks and we'll move on'. So from day 1 I started my final project, which was essentially writing any program that needed to include the various lessons from the class. So I essentially wrote the old tank battle game "Scorched Earth" for the Apple 2gs.

Went to Purdue for electrical engineering, and my programming skills were brought into the modern era with C, as well as teaching me assembly. I have used assembly a grand total of once professionally, and hope I never need to again lol.

Now I work for the company that invented the hard drive in 1956, which was 5MB and about the size of a washing machine, and just announced our new 22TB and 26TB 3.5" HDDs 3 weeks ago in 3.5" form factor...

It's been a fun road...
 

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