Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts

tempus-word.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 52 posts

Re: A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts

#21

Post by AlecSchueler »

mhd wrote: post #20
tjansen wrote: post #8

The ST had some awesome productivity programs. Tempus Word, Papyrus, Calamus... All running on a 8 Mhz computer with 1 or 2 MB, but with feature sets that do not need to hide from today's software.

People doing DTP with Calamus on their Ataris stuck around for a long time after the systems weren't used for much else – MIDI tooling excepted, of course. On the other hand, there you didn't have that many powerful packages on any system, besides Quark & the various Adobe tools du jour everything paled in comparison. For word processing, being forced to use Word was/is usually worse than for DTP, though. But feature…

DTP? GRRM?

Re: A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts

#22

Post by bux93 »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #21
mhd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People doing DTP with Calamus on their Ataris stuck around for a long time after the systems weren't used for much else – MIDI tooling excepted, of course. On the other hand, there you didn't have that many powerful packages on any system, besides Quark & the various Adobe tools du jour everything paled in comparison. For word processing, being forced to use Word was/is usually worse than for DTP, though. But feature…

DTP? GRRM?

DeskTop Publishing - WYSIWYG design of printed matter (What You See Is What You Get) on PC(Personal Computer)s.

George R.R. Martin (No idea about the Rs), author of A Song of Ice and Fire which was adapted into Game of Thrones.

Re: A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts

#23

Post by klondike_klive »

m-i-l wrote: post #17

I used ST Writer which came bundled with my ST. I still have all my ST Writer files (last modified in 1993!), and quite impressively they open just fine in LibreOffice with formatting and everything preserved (unlike some later .doc files I have).

That is genuinely remarkable! Even indentation?

Re: A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts

#25

Post by buescher »

mhd wrote: post #20
tjansen wrote: post #8

The ST had some awesome productivity programs. Tempus Word, Papyrus, Calamus... All running on a 8 Mhz computer with 1 or 2 MB, but with feature sets that do not need to hide from today's software.

People doing DTP with Calamus on their Ataris stuck around for a long time after the systems weren't used for much else – MIDI tooling excepted, of course. On the other hand, there you didn't have that many powerful packages on any system, besides Quark & the various Adobe tools du jour everything paled in comparison. For word processing, being forced to use Word was/is usually worse than for DTP, though. But feature…

It's not surprising that people who write professionally would learn one tool to the point it gets out of the way and then not want to change. It's not just sticking with the first thing they learned - there's a constant churn of "tools for distraction-free writing" that address some of the complaints that people that still use older word processors have about more up-to-date systems.

Once you know the pattern, every so often you'll see a piece about a writer or journalist and the funky software they use and you can just wait for it... it's going to be Wordstar, XyWrite, one of the XEDIT editors, sometimes Wordperfect for DOS. Rarely Word for DOS. Neal Stephenson uses emacs, but he's an outlier in a lot of ways. I think there was a piece linked here recently by a journalist who uses the macOS TextEdit for note-taking, which dates back to NeXSTEP. (not exactly the same thing, but consider)

Re: A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts

#26

Post by scherlock »

drcongo wrote: post #15
manoDev wrote: post #4

The list of features is impressive even today! https://tempus-word.de/en/info/index

Those were the glory days of word processors, I used to have something similar on the Amiga. I'd still rather write on something like this than Word, Pages or Google Docs.

At least Word has an outline mode, GDocs is the worst. A text editor with markdown support is better than GDocs.

Re: A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts

#28

Post by p_l »

m-i-l wrote: post #17

I used ST Writer which came bundled with my ST. I still have all my ST Writer files (last modified in 1993!), and quite impressively they open just fine in LibreOffice with formatting and everything preserved (unlike some later .doc files I have).

.DOC was never meant to be interoperable, even across Word versions (much), you were supposed to save "final" or "exchange" versions in RTF :)

Re: A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts

#29

Post by p_l »

mhd wrote: post #20
tjansen wrote: post #8

The ST had some awesome productivity programs. Tempus Word, Papyrus, Calamus... All running on a 8 Mhz computer with 1 or 2 MB, but with feature sets that do not need to hide from today's software.

People doing DTP with Calamus on their Ataris stuck around for a long time after the systems weren't used for much else – MIDI tooling excepted, of course. On the other hand, there you didn't have that many powerful packages on any system, besides Quark & the various Adobe tools du jour everything paled in comparison. For word processing, being forced to use Word was/is usually worse than for DTP, though. But feature…

Late 1990s supposedly a considerable extension on use of Macs for DTP was that Quark could get significantly automated with AppleScript, and some publishing houses had non-trivial workflows done that way to reduce time spent on preparation.

Re: A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts

#30

Post by WillAdams »

I wish WriteNow was similarly available/supported --- it was probably one of the last major applications written in assembly language (~100,000 lines).

XyWrite is supported in a similar fashion: https://mendelson.org/xywin.html (but I just helped folks use that, never actually found it comfortable myself).

I kind of wish all these small/tight/efficient programs could be gathered up and ported to an optimized OS for the Raspberry Pi....

Post reply on HN