WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996)

I'd heard of Heaviside, but only recently got the beginnings of an appreciation for what he did and who he was through a series of YouTube videos by a retired, decidedly eccentric, but so far as I can tell largely legit retired GE electrical engineer, Eric Dollard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiDnheGvXRA

(My own assessment abilities are limited here, though spot-checking so far has confirmed statements and content.)

The distinction made between "longhand" vs. "typewritten page" metaphors of editors is an interesting one.

I've used WordStar (decades ago), it's one of a long chain of editors and wordprocessors I've had experience with on DOS, CPM, Mac, VMS, MVS, Unix/Linux, and MS Windows systems. For the past few decades, vi/vim has been my principle editor. In the past five years, largely with either Markdown, LaTeX, or HTML markup languages (there was a time I composed uni papers using nroff, long since passed...).

The notion of markup languages, with commenting, and vi/vim's movement and "editing language" seems to capture pretty much all of what Sawyer describes as "longhand" editing. With vim, I move throughout the document, either within the principle window or splitting the window to either get an additional view on the current document or open an additional one.

With markup languages, comments may be included (HTML-style for both HTML and Markdown, '%' leaders in LaTeX, etc.). And of course, what you type is what you mean rather than what you see.

To that extent I'd argue WordStar's legacy lives.

That's interesting, I'd not seen that video before.

I have the excellent book and bio on Heaviside titled Oliver Heaviside: The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age by Paul J. Nahin. I'm not suggesting you buy it but it's a good reference to look up when you're next in a library.

Also, it's a very worthwhile exercise to download copies of Heaviside's books from the Internet Archive (there are about five or so and several come in multiple volumes). They're all out of copyright so they won't cost anything.

I'm not suggesting you read them through seriously but if you just peruse them for a while then you'll soon learn what a genius he was.

Within minutes, you'll get the message that he doesn't abide fools well and that he was not averse to making side comments in his textbooks (actually I find that aspect of his writing interesting because you get the gist of how he's thinking), but overall you'll be taken aback at his rigor. These books were written around 120-140 years ago, if you put them under a modern cover and you weren't overly famimiar with the subject then you could be forgiven for thinking that they were written yesterday.

Remember Heaviside also invented vector calculus and much of the modern electrical terminology such as impedance, conductance, admittance, permeability and permittivity, etc. It's amazing, but these terms are all now commonplace in our testbooks. I cannot recall of any other person who has introduced so many new scientific terms to science and engineering as Heaviside did.

You're correct, he was eccentric especially towards the end of his life. I reckon I'd likely have had an argument with him within minutes of meeting him but that's irrelevant here, it's the content of technical mind that we're interested in. Remember, he wasn't the only genius with an awkward temperament, from many accounts Issac Newton was likely much worse - and often petty minded into the bargin.