My start in the world of urban work environments was an office temp. Oddly enough I got pretty good at using Word Perfect and was given free training for more features and stuff by one of the top temp agencies at the time, and then I got to work the "lobster" shift at lawfirms and banks.
Word Perfect for DOS has a ton of features that folks normally wouldn't know about like redlining and all kinds of fancy image rendering things (sorry it was > 25 years ago and I can't recollect specifics), law firms had an entire version-control system integrated with it.
Word Perfect was also how I ended up being an actual programmer for money in NYC. I started automating my work at some of these firms with macros and later with some C and Perl code and some of the gigs I had I could just walk in and spend all day on IRC while I'd get paid $20 an hour (which was a lot) for my scripts to run through all the docs they thought I was re-formatting by hand.
Reveal Codes was the single greatest feature of WordPerfect - I'm convinced Microsoft continues to refuse to provide the equivalent out of spite for WP.
Does anyone else remember calling into WP tech support during its heyday? They had a hold queue disk jokey that would interact with people on hold. It was a nice touch.
The reason reveal codes isn't available in Word isn't some kind of petty spite. Word just doesn't intersperse formatting codes in the stream like WordPerfect did (or html does, to some extent). It puts all formatting information in a binary block at the end of each paragraph. That's both more flexible, and more fragile.
As an aside, me and my wife, we translated WordPerfect 6 for DOS into Latin for the Vatican, as freelance translators.
> As an aside, me and my wife, we translated WordPerfect 6 for DOS into Latin for the Vatican, as freelance translators.
Come on, now. You can't just throw this out on a tech nerd forum and not explain. What exactly do you mean "translate"? As in, you translated all the menus and help text into Latin, or you helped them integrate good tools for writing in Latin? More details, please. :)
We took the text, and translated it into Latin, so there was a Latin version of WordPerfect for use in the Vatican. Only the user interface, not the dictionaries or things like that. After all, a cardinal is supposed not to need dictionaries to write proper Latin.
I'm a little bit confused by this. Isn't the modern docx format just a bunch of XML markup in a zip file?
Actually, I'm sure the modern docx format is just a bunch of XML markup. I just created a toy docx with the text "This is a test." and ripped it open with a little bit of python that I had lying around from previous experiments along those lines[1]
Looking at the output of the file 'word/document.xml', in relevant part, we see:
which looks like the underlying XML representation indeed intersperses formatting codes in the stream, at least in part---certainly it's clear that the "is" is italicized"...
That seems like enough information to build reveal codes out of...
WordPerfect definitely has styles, so in a way WordPerfect is like CSS. Whatever Word is it has always been a little broken, and remains a little broken to this day. When a document gets large weird style behavior creeps in and makes the editing slightly non-deterministic. With the lack of "reveal codes" like Wordperfect always had, the result is kind of miserable. If I were King for a day...
To continue the analogies, think of silverware and related instruments.
Notepad and TextEdit are like plastic utensils. They do the job (albeit not very well) and you can't really mess up.
Word, Pages and WordPerfect are like regular forks and knives. Not too much harder to use although they do require a bit more discipline.
TeX (and its derivatives/predecessors - Troff, Eqn, Grap) are like scalpels. Extremely powerful, but if you mess up, it can be hard to recover.
This doesn't even get into the fact that the last category must be compiled into a document, and making sure that everything gets into the funnel can be a real challenge for the uninitiated.
I don't know why everybody thinks Microsoft Word doesn't have Reveal Codes. They have it; it's called Reveal Formatting; it has mostly been there since version 1.0 which I remember installing from 100 floppy disks in college in 1989.
Word's "Reveal Formatting" just shows tabs, spaces, and carriage returns as distinct symbols iirc.
Wordperfect's "Show Codes" tells you every attribute and layout change inline.
For example, if bolded some text, Word would just bold it. Wordperfect would insert a symbol like [bold] and the text would be plain, instead of rendering it. Removing the code symbol would change the attribute from the text. This allowed you do to format documents for printing on a system that couldn't handle displaying them fully formatted interactively.
I remember trying this when my dad bought a Windows PC with Word 2.0 (or something), so I could use that instead of his work laptop with WordPerfect. I do remember finding it really didn't work as well, though I don't remember exactly why any more.
This isn't a great response, I know. It's just a data point for the theory that Word and WordPerfect are comparable in this respect.
(This is going back so long ago now. I was still at school! Maybe the problem was that you still had to interact with the GUI view to fix things? So you could still end up with the usual weird Word stuff, but no way to fix it, because you couldn't get right in there and just manually shuffle the codes around like you could with WP.)
While MS Word does have Reveal Formatting, it is really not a good replacement for Reveal Codes. It's a clunky way to see isolated formating for a short portion of text. For example, how to search for all places in the text for a font change, or margin change, or section format change. It's difficult to also show where certain formatting starts or stops.
Under WP, you can instantly scan the entire document looking for those changes. Not so with MS Word. That being said, RF is better to compare 2 sections of text to immediately show their differences.
ALT+F3! That works a lot better on the original Model F keyboards where the function keys were in two columns on the left side of the keyboard. I would love to have a modern version with 12 function keys on the left ...
The Kinesis Freestyle Edge has 12 such keys in that position. The mechanical gaming version (RGB) allows them all to be arbitrarily mapped, and function keys are one good use of them.
Thanks - both your suggestion and @davewongillies are close ... but my ideal keyboard is still the "87 key" layout with the inverted T, but with 12 function keys on the left. On modern PCs it's hard to live without the F11 and F12 keys.
I'd even settle for a 12 key keypad on the left as well - that might be more doable. Looks like I might have to build this myself from scratch ...
There are a few commercial keyboards out there that offer this. I was going to suggest the Logitech G110 that I use, but it appears that model's no longer manufactured. Still, there are others.
I think the DJ role rotated amongst the support staff. At least that's what I told happened in the UK (Source: worked for Lotus Support, nearly worked at WP).
> They had a hold queue disk jokey that would interact with people on hold. It was a nice touch.
That sounds pretty cool. Can you tell us more? How did the DJ interact? Could you choose your music style and get different music like some phone systems offer these days? Was there a live DJ like you’d find in a club for the whole time they were taking calls?
Reveal codes really is the number one thing I miss in every word processing software since WordPerfect. Fortunately I rarely have to do word processing anymore, but I’d hate to do it as a full time job without reveal codes.
Lawyers of a certain generation all mourn the loss of WordPerfect terribly, mostly because of reveal codes. I remember using it in law practice as late as 2006.
The AlphaSmart Neo devices became tremendously popular among writers recently, apparently many of them can’t stand modern software anymore because it has become too visually distracting for them: https://orcutt.net/weblog/2018/03/17/my-prodigiously-convolu...
Distractions certainly are too blame here, but my pet theory is that the added visual input blocks top down imagery in the visual system.
five? ADWD was published in 2011. We're coming quickly up on ten years for the next to last book, no one holds out any hope the last one will ever be written.
The popular theory on reddit is that he Winds of Winter almost finished around season 5 of the show, but found plot holes (specifically in Mereen) and basically rewrote the whole thing.
He does, but he's also a terrible pointer if we're trying to explain ancient tech is still relevant to writers. GRRM is such a celebrity that he's just riding out the "I'll write some more when I feel like it" money train, making him more of a hobbyist (with very good connections) compared to the vast majority of "there isn't enough time in a human life to write all the things I want to write" people in the fiction writing world.
Having something with very few bells and whistles lets you focus on your writing. Whether that's a "only works in fullscreen, you don't get to multitask" markdown editor, or a 1992 486 running word perfect on DOS basically makes no difference.
I know a fairly well-known children's author that continues to write using a typewriter out in an outbuilding on his farm. I imagine it's a very effective way to focus (for me, I'd have to make sure I didn't have my phone).
I have an electric typewriter I use occasionally. It makes for a very different feel than both typing on a computer and hand-writing. (The only reason I don't use it more often is that it has terrible ergonomics, even compared with today's flat keyboards.)
He's written 13 novels and lots of shorter works. He's not someone who's written very little.
I think his fundamental problem is that he's in a position that few writers end up in -- he became so popular that if he doesn't end the book well he will be hated and reviled by thousands of people on the internet. Most writers never end up in a position where if they let the public down, they will become hated figures.
Microsoft word is fine if you're not doing anything too complicated and don't get fancy. Lots of people don't properly use the styles feature of Word (aka don't learn the tool basics) and then scream and yell at it. I've cranked out some rather long docs with it without hardly any issues at all. Just like people who rule out emacs or vim, 95% of them don't take time to properly learn the tool that they are using. That said I still prefer TeX/LateX for my own stuff and when I get a choice (I using don't get the chance because it's using collaborating on a Microsoft document online these days).
Big companies are only capable of sustaining what they do.
That’s why Outlook and Excel are almost operating systems and Word meanders around with no real focus. It is not an opinionated app.
Changes in Word are driven by awful end user communities like attorneys. Attorneys are smart people, but the influential ones have doctor egos, get set in their ways, and spend their day interacting with fossilized bureaucracies, as demonstrated by the fact that people are still screwing around with WordPerfect 5 for DOS in 2020.
The excuses given (ie “Federal court filings are finicky”) are 100% bullshit. The reality is the chief poobah of counsel likes WordPerfect because he’s the chief poohbah, and his minions get to suck it up and learn how to use an application released when they were in diapers.
Attorneys are usually people who went to three years of law school and then passed the bar exam. Possibly many years ago. I have found that their most distinguishing characteristic is that they didn't quit law school.
They tend to be smart in the exact same ratio as any other college graduate. That is to say, some attorneys are smart.
Word suffers from the case that it needs all features for all users accessible at almost all times (despite most people only needing about 20% of it at a given time). Word actually has a great "Focus Mode" if you can find it (among other ways to get to it there's a button for it in the status bar these days).
I wrote most of a novella in the iOS version of Word last year for NaNoWriMo, mostly because I really liked Word's OneDrive-based sync to make sure I was always up to date no matter which device I used and that I could reasonably trust offline sync in the rare cases where I worked on the document on multiple devices "in parallel" because one was offline. The iOS version defaults to "Focus Mode" and that eventually pushed me to figuring out how to get the right "Focus Mode" settings on my desktop to get a similar writing experience, which turned out to be easy when you knew what you were looking for.
I think it's all another reminder that it isn't necessarily your tools, but how you use them and how familiar you are with them. In a nutshell that is most of the discussions here, use what you like and if a 30+ year old word processing tool meets your needs, wonderful. On the flipside, the modern tools aren't without their merits and there are similar familiarity tricks to using them that maybe just take a bit a seeking them out or learning them.
My wife does that. She sent messages to her people on social media and it turned out many of them wanted to do the same thing.
Now she writes to her friends all over the world. And since it's paper mail that takes between three days and two weeks to arrive, there's no posturing. No boasting. No one-upsmanship. It's people really writing about things that are actually important to them because it takes effort.
Letter writing / penpal'ing is really magical -- specifically for the reasons you noted. Even with friends I speak with (digitally or in person) on a regular basis have plenty to talk about in a letter.
I hadn't purchased a stamp for years. Its remarkable that sending a letter domestically can be done for around a dollar.
To be fair, DOS was new and exciting when A Game of Thrones was first published, and I don’t think anyone wants to have to reformat the extensive notes for ASOIAF every five to seven years.
When I need to write distraction free I open a fullscreen Vim terminal window. I copy the pages into a more shareable format after I draft them in plain text.
"A Game of Thrones" was published in August 1996[1]. Windows 95 was new an exciting then. OS/2 Warp was new an exciting then. DOS was already old, and I'm assuming GRRM used it just because that was what he was used to.
Maybe a word processor is just a tool and if it's useful and gets the job done, no matter how "outdated" everyone else things it is, why bother to change?
I would argue that perhaps he wants to focus on writing and not perpetually learning new tech but lately writing seems to be lower on his priorities. Glad I never got sucked up into the books - as good as they are; it's pretty apparent he really doesn't want to finish them which is a shame.
Meh, I was still using DOS (w/ 4DOS) back then because I vastly preferred it (BBS and cli apps in general) over Windows 3.x. My use of GUI didn't really start until Windows 95 and was solidified with Winamp.
That's the distinction with which everyone is being bogged down.
George R. R. Martin is a storyteller. There's a difference. Stephen King is a writer. Michael Crichton was a writer.
Crichton summed up what it is to be a writer in the most simplistic and eloquent-in-its-brevity language I think I've ever heard: "If you're going to be a writer, then you have to write. You have to wake up every day and sit down and write. Can you imagine if a pilot woke up one morning and said, 'I don't feel like flying the plane today.'"
If we are defining whether someone is a writer or not by the amount of published content they create, then very very few people are actually writers. If you have to have the published output of a Stephen King to be considered a "true writer" then I imagine there would only be a handful around the world. That's surely what your argument is implying, right? That it's whether someone is publishing a lot that defines "writer-ness"?
Basically my point is, just because someone is not adding titles to their bibliography every year or so doesn't mean they're not doing the act of writing every day. In fact, there are many references online to the importance Martin places on writing every day. And in fact, he has published things since his last ASOIAF book.
To try to say "This man is not a writer because he hasn't released the books I want to read" feels kind of silly to me.
For the worse, if you were doing heavy-duty word processing. It's not that there were no usable WYSIWYG word processors, but even the star of the show (AmiPro) was rather limited in its feature set compared to WordPerfect, and they were really competitors to LetterPerfect and the like: great for simple text editing, but templating, macros, and so forth were toys at best - and you really needed to pay close attention to the maxim "the computer you want costs $5000 and will be obsolete when delivered" if you didn't want to type too far ahead of the screen.
AmiPro was _not_ a good wordprocessor. It had fatal flaws, like visible redrawing the entire paragraph when changing a single character or adding a single character. And the more text you wrote, the slower it would become, because it would format everything from start; even after a page or two, the delay would be noticeable.
I got a Neo2 a while back and found it nice for note taking. I put my notes in Pandoc Markdown and then convert to pdf on a pc. While the Neo2 has no GUI elements, I'm not convinced that it's any better for distraction compared to an airgapped pc running Word/OneNote. Curious if anyone has tried the latter(which I admit is getting harder to do as my newer computers don't have removable wireless adapter).
Those that have written whole books on it typically mention the following advantages over a PC or notebook with some distraction free environment:
* hundreds of hours of battery life on 3 AAA batteries
* readable in bright sunlight
* instant on and off (you are back to your text with a button press, no waiting for booting up)
* portability and durability (great for traveling and writing..)
I have a 40$ (incl. shipping to Europe) Neo 2 too and do appreciate all these details. The manufacturers got a lot right.
I’ve tried distraction free terminal writing on an old x200 and other old and virtually disconnected devices too before but it wasn’t the same. E.g. in a library or café, searching for a free and calm spot with power supply and no sunlight on my screen is a problem I don’t have with my little AlphaSmart.
The fact that you can only write is the exact reason that it is such a loved device. If want to get distracted by the lust of hacking the device instead of writing, there are thousands of other alternatives.
Many NICs can be disabled in BIOS/UEFI. Laptops can disable the WiFi usually with a switch and/or keyboard shortcut. Barring that, the specific drivers can be uninstalled.
I'm not sure why more authors don't use Latex, it's superior to all of these other also ancient ways of putting things on paper. I did my first thesis (forced by my engineering advisor) on it and fucking hated it for the first few weeks and then something just clicked (or my brain broke) and I've been using it since for most of my word processing needs.
If you have fairly sophisticated formatting needs, like if you’re writing technical papers with formulae, the latex is a help. For most authors, who are in the business of writing words (not formatting documents) latex offers nothing.
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
<your words here>
\end {document}
is pretty lightweight and distraction-free. Substitute the appropriate documentclass for whatever thing you're working on (book, report, whatever), and it will just work, provided you're willing to accept a lot of default formatting.
Once you get into twiddling formatting, then you're back in the realm of non-distraction-free writing, but that's not the tool's fault.
LaTeX is relevant if you use it as part of your tool chain. That's like saying "Markdown isn't relevant; the text editor is." No. They're both relevant.
In grad school (philosophy) I found Latex (via Markdown/pandoc) let me focus on writing words and do styling/layout of my papers (and keeping the bibliography consistent) as a separate task.
I first decided to give it a shot when I was redoing my CV after the Oral Defense portion of my MA in early 2013.
Like you, I spent the first couple of days cursing BasicTex in all sorts of ways until it just clicked. The Tex Stack Exchange was a big help in solving some of the more complicated formatting conversions I needed to do.
That said, I think that community in particular can be slightly hostile to new users because they will vehemently insist on a working example that people can run themselves in order to debug it. To your point that not as many people use it as probably could, this may have something to do with it.
E.g, "My project doesn't typeset, is effectively "broken", and until you really think about it, the error messages seem inscrutable."
I understand why this is the case, but if my problem is a syntax error - because I don't get how something works - this approach is...not helpful.
At this point, with the exception of actual plaintext notes, just about every project I work on (words or code) goes through some kind of "compile" step, whether that's Rake/Make, npm scripts, shell functions, Markdown.pl, etc.
It's just burned into my brain at this point and comes naturally when the work is done.
LibreOffice has a full-screen mode. If you enable it and also disable Rulers and Text Boundaries then you see only the pages, the text, and a scroll bar at the edge of the screen (unless your GUI toolkit has vanishing scrollbars enabled, which is IMO more distracting). Run it on a laptop without Internet access and nothing else installed for minimal distraction.
Like a X200 Where you remove or disable the Wifi card. Sturdy machines with a decent keyboard.
Wondering how long it will take for someone to take up the task of configuring a veeery simplistic 'JustWriteOS' that optimized on distraction free writing. Should be possible to build this upon Alpine or NixOS with a tiling window manager preconfigured to only start the text editor full screen in distraction free mode.
My biggest problem with things like that is there's still all the mental overhead of styling clutter. You copy and paste something from a webpage and it's all mangled.
I think half the success of markdown is identifying a useful subset of html/document languages and saying "this is your whole featureset, everything else is out of scope for composition".
Works on far too few things. I find I just paste into notepad more often than not. But then you lose styling you like such as hyperlinks, bullets, bold/italic-for-emphasis, etc.
Which comes back to Markdown, which is the "useful subset".
I like the idea for a low-tech, no-distraction solution for writing but man, this AlphaSmart device looks really crap. I hate chiclet keyboards, but I know that not everybody agrees. On the other hand, I can't imagine that anybody finds these 1990's style low-contrast LCD matrix displays pleasant to read. I'd sooner use an actual old-school typewriter.
There appear to be some e-paper solutions but they're expensive.
Honestly I think I'd rather go the George R R Martin route: take an old laptop with decent screen and keyboard then install a barebones environment. It could be as simple as booting straight to a full-screen vim/nano with no distraction installed.
I wish I could do something like that for coding, unfortunately when I program I usually need a browser and internet access to browse docs so I can't remove that. Maybe I should see if I can survive with only elinks or some low-featured web browser.
This can be done with modern tech. A lot of the time I use a Debian box for my personal stuff with keyboard and cheap 1080p display. It does not run X at all. It's literally just framebuffer console, tmux and terminals. I don't use a web browser on it either.
A neat side effect of this is the machine I use is a fanless N3010 celeron based Lenovo M600 which feels positively lightning quick if you never go near the www on it. Perhaps 90% of the reason a PC feels like a sluggish POS these days is because there's some chunk of browser stack in there somewhere.
Cheap Chromebooks work well for this, as long as they're among the models that can be jailbroken and take a proper Linux install. Ample power to run a text editor and a textmode browser (Emacs and eww, or any other, lesser, choice you may prefer), but not enough for graphical browsing and other distractions. Too, since they're specced to run Chrome for a couple hours, you can easily get 8 to 10 hours of battery life running something less absurd.
The keyboards aren't what you call great, but they serve well enough. I like a mechanical keyboard as much as the next dork, but I've never really felt the lack when using the Chromebook for writing.
> Cheap Chromebooks work well for this, as long as they're among the models that can be jailbroken and take a proper Linux install.
Jailbreaking Chromebooks is a huge hassle, though. Much easier to install Linux on a standard box from the past 10 to 15 years. You can also buy cheap low-end hardware with Chromebooks-like specs that will run Linux out of the box.
Not sure about the older Alphasmarts, but the Neos have pretty standard laptop keys. The display contrast isn't great, but it's not terrible like the late 80s/early 90s graphic LCDs. The small footprint compared to a current laptop is nice.
I'm also building something like what you are thinking about with an old intel NUC mounted on an even older LCD monitor and running Xmonad. It's a surprisingly fun project. My notes on the build are here:
https://hackaday.io/project/174680-distraction-free-linux-ba...
Disclaimer that may invalidate the rest of my post: I tend to prefer scizzor-switch keyboards. For example, I adore the Apple Keyboards that shipped with iMacs up until ~2016, although I strongly dislike their newer “Magic Keyboard” (never mind the Butterfly Keyboard) which IMO has too little travel.
But now that you know my biases, let me say that I think the Alpasmart has a damn good keyboard! The keys are large, have more travel than most modern laptops, and feel quite satisfying to press. If you’re used to a mechanical keyboard and really set on that experience, you may be disappointed, but there’s still a lot to like.
I too thought the key travel was fine with my AlphaSmart 3000, but found them too loud when typing in a conference room. That 500 (no typo) hour battery life with 3 AA batteries though. Brilliant device.
I have one, and it's a lovely machine. An 8-bit but it can take a meg or so of RAM and a few megs of storage. Unfortunately, on unique, proprietary memory cards.
I would adore a modern version, say running text-only Linux on a RasPi Zero W. No hinge, letterbox mono screen, and a couple of CF or full-size SD slots...
The Alphasmart Neo keyboard has a decent tactile feel for a membrane keyboard.
The LCD displays aren't great on the eyes but they are OK, and they have the benefit of excellent battery life using just standard AAs and much lower latency compared to e-paper.
Is that an actual LCD matrix display? One would think that a small-form-factor e-paper display (the format that's sometimes used for shelf labels and the like) could replace monochrome LCD pretty much everywhere these days.
I always get this terminology confused. My Pebble 2 supposedly has an “e-paper” display, but based on looks I’m pretty sure it’s the same type of screen as what’s in my graphing calculator and my AlphaSmart Dana, although the latter two definitely have less contrast than the Pebble, I assume because they’re older and/or of lower quality.
They feel really great; very similar to a PowerBook keyboard of the era. There's a different model (AlphaSmart Dana) that runs Palm OS 4 if that type of display is more your thing.
It’s just for drafts, so you write \cite{somepaper} and fill in the actual keyword later. For those who use it for academic writing such devices remove another distraction from deep fluent writing.
Optionally, markdown also has syntax for references.
"Syntax for references" is not what's being discussed here. What's being discussed is the ability to write \cite{Robinson89}, and have it come out correctly in whatever style you need, by pulling the actual citation data from a database.
Back in my day when I did such things it was just Excel with some macros and filters. What this person is doing is very similar to what I did, but it was a subset as I use macros to pull up things easily and search the text of them. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/organizing-y...
I have few laptops lying around. I wonder if there is some kind of Linux distribution or some other way to transform laptop into a digital typewriter. No internet, no applications, only a decent text editor (Emacs perhaps).
Set up your init system to not start a GUI. It will give you a text mode login prompt. Configure it to have the typeface and size that you like. Run your editor of choice -- emacs and vim certainly don't need net access. Remember to mount a USB stick to save backup copies every so often.
I have been toying with this concept as custom distro for a while now... I held off because I didn't think there was any interest in it other than as my own vanity project.
You could set up a script for something like Void/Alpine to just launch vim/emacs as soon as you boot, those are both pretty minimalist ootb, you'd just have to remove internet drivers.
Pretty trippy. This requires a licensed copy of WordPerfect, which Corel no longer sells. They gave the rights to a woman who operates by email with the handle thewp51lady@att.net: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/links.html#obtain
After reading those paragraphs I'd be inclined to just pirate the damn thing. It's very confusing. I can't tell if you actually get a license if you order from that random lady or if it's just replacement disks. There's a long section afterward about how to obtain a license key and it's basically "scour the used market and pray that you don't get scammed".
You may have quite a challenge on your hands with that approach. WordPerfect for DOS is a very complicated piece of software that comes with a 600+ page paper manual. The program is absolutely chock-full of keyboard shortcuts and hidden functionality. It's not discoverable the way a modern GUI application would be.
Buying it on eBay may be one of the only legal ways to get your hands on that manual. Though I suppose you could also look for a 3rd-party book, it may not cover every feature of the application.
Lots of people got 80% of the way there with one of those keyboard templates -- a plastic overlay that fits around your function keys and tells you what it does by itself, and when combined with Shift/Ctrl/Alt, and in the margins explains some other useful keys. But it's easier to learn by word of mouth -- when everyone around you is using it and you can ask the person next to you. Obviously that route doesn't work anymore! So people might actually read the manual.
WP had excellent documentation. It came with a “workbook” for step-by-step learning and with a separate full reference manual.
MS Office’s documentation is a travesty. Most appalling is how MS has given up on having help files. It used to come with good “online help” - back when that meant that it was on your system, not on the Internet. They’ve since just removed all help so that when you ask for help, the first thing you get is “searching Office Online.”
I had a pretty decent idea how Word worked 20 years ago. Now I just thrash about in there and click stuff and Google for random webpages for help.
Not too long ago I was asked to do some maintenance programming on a logistics program (the program did amongst others: fill the various operated trucks to not more than capacity from orders, add new orders at any time, plan the route to drive so it doesn't take more than a workday), all written in WordPerfect 5.1 macros. That program can do a lot more than most people know about. And apparently it's still used in production.
Writeroom (for Mac or its derivatives for other operating systems) --Pyroom for Linux --Darkroom for Windows --Also Q10 for Windows (which has typewriter sounds); GhostWriter, NisusWriter Pro; Ulysses.
These are distraction-free writing programs. The purpose is to eliminate computer interruptions or temptations so that you can write.
Scrivener: for editing and organization. Scrivener is a writing and organization program. It was originally developed by a novelist who was frustrated by how difficult it is to move back and forth in long Word documents. Word's Document Map doesn't work all that well. Originally Scrivener was supposed to be just a first draft production document but it has grown and can currently be used to create documents in just about any format a writer will need (it's a little weak on appellate briefs). It also has a full-screen distraction free mode. If you need to complete a long work quickly you need Scrivener.
Also consider: Alphasmart, by Dana. This is a full-size keyboard attached to a Palm(pilot) operating system. It comes with a Word-compatible Word processor. You use SD cards to get your files off the computer. There is also an educational model which is cheaper and has less functionality. Battery life for these is very good: think weeks instead of hours.
Not just SD cards: the AlphaSmart series (Dana is the name of the unit, not the other way around) can emulate keyboards. Connect the Dana via USB to another computer and it will "type" your notes into it. My mother transferred her church notes this way. All AlphaSmarts do this but Dana is the most useful for modern systems because of its connectivity options and being Palm-based besides. It was really the closest thing to a Palm laptop.
While mentioning distraction free alternatives, even Word has a full screen "Focus Mode", if that is the tool you have available or need to use for whatever reason.
Another useful tip: Word's Focus Mode, like some of the ones mentioned, goes to a Full Screen window. In Windows 10 you can set "Focus Assist" settings that will turn off all notifications that Windows is aware of and things like that whenever you are using a full screen application. (I believe that particular Focus Assist option is actually the default now, but it's easy to double check.)
I was inspired to do something similar after reading these two posts on using the Amiga version of WordPerfect for writing. [1], [2].
It’s distraction free, works well with a modern monitor and I always liked the Amiga keyboard. It’s a huge context switch to swivel my chair from my modern Mac to the other desk and start writing on the Amiga.
These were a great read! I have made a headless linux laptop with vim as a fairly distraction free environment. I have also used a Psion 5MX to take notes while out and about, and my only caveat for those wanting to use retro devices for important things is to back up often! I'd forgotten how unreliable old filesystems and media were.
I think there's definitely a niche for a keyboard-driven PDA type device, ideally with some sort of e-ink display so it works nicely outside and doesn't require frequent charging. I think these days it would come with some sort of automatic cloud backup, and I wouldn't mind if it was text-based either. The gemini and cosmos come close, but I think I'd need a proper bit of time with them to see if they fill that niche or not.
I'm surprised it isn't translated to C, so it can run without a DOS emulator.
I've done this to multiple large programs written in DOS assembler. It isn't that hard. You don't even have to know how the program works to translate it.
Interesting. How does one approach such a task? Do you just use your knowledge of assembler/C to transcribe it to C? Or is it automated to some extent?
I love how a small community is keeping a piece of software alive which is probably forgotten by most people. Adding the euro symbol or the ability to create PDF files.
While they are built for different purposes, they are still 40+ year old editors that are still in use today. Although vi, or should I say vim, is still seeing more active development than wordperfect for dos, it's still true to its original ui and design. So, if you don't find weird that many of us are using vi on a daily basis, maybe we shouldn't find it weird that wordperfect for dos is still in use today.
Because it highlights the same thing: failure of modern graphical UIs.
The programmers that prefer VIM (or Emacs) to more modern fully features graphical IDEs are basically the same as the writer who prefers an old DOS program.
It means that old software was more usable and reliable to the point that a lot of people is more productive with it than modern programs. It is a big fail of the modern way of realizing applications.
The triumph of modern GUIs lies with the discoverability that the mouse/trackpad/touchscreen bring to the table. This is absolutely critical for onboarding beginners. In the modern day, computers are so ubiquitous that the vast majority of users are either beginners or dabblers (basically an eternal beginner).
Text-based interfaces have always been way faster at what they do (anything non-graphical). You simply cannot beat the efficiency of a power user who knows all of the keyboard shortcuts for their favourite text editor. I don't think that's an indictment of the GUI, however. The GUI ushered in ubiquitous computing akin to the personal automobile. Text-based interfaces remain a powerful, highly specialized tool for those who have the time and the need to learn them.
Yes in the general case, but not for text editing software. Discoverability is great in modern GUIs, for example a photos app on a mobile device. There are lots of options and they’re all mostly independent and needed in different cases. So it’s great you can just get started, click around at icons that look familiar and get results.
I would argue that this doesn’t apply specifically to text editors. 95% of all text documents are paragraphs with headings and inline formatting. With styles and display codes, WordPerfect lived up to its name. You could get the document looking perfect, exactly the way you wanted it. WYSIWYG editors look nice and could get you started quickly, but anything more than a letter turned into a mishmash of styles and fonts and spacing. The now-infamous ribbon in Word lets you discover and apply all sorts of formatting, but what you really want are consistent paragraph styles. Word perfect guided you into using those styles because the UI was restricted in just the right way.
Emacs' built in help is pretty good, I think. If you teach someone C-h f for function help, C-h k for keybind help, etc. I think they can get pretty far. The which-key package is great for discoverability as well. You can start pressings keys and then see a map of which next key presses do which action.
I used vim for years, but always used a search engine to figure stuff out. I think Emacs got it right here.
There's also the graphical menu system in Emacs, but I've always hidden it and avoided it.
A place I was working at in the early 90's cleared out a storage room of old software boxes. I snagged together complete sets of WP 5.1 in both 3.5" disks and 5.25" disks. Grey box, manuals and all.
If I had ever suspected such a thing like Ebay could have ever existed I would have carted the whole dumpster home. Oh well...
I evaluated it vs multimate and decide to use later. I think it is too shocked to be used by the typing pool that use 8.0 inch floppy wang machine. Unfortunately it did not play out when I found myself surrounded by 20 pretty typists, no not lovely standing there but attacked me like hell. I did not aware the change is not just the pool.
“Who are you that changed my word processor and typewriter! Who are you?! What is that rubbish computer you are giving to us.” Given that they are serving all the top bosses in the organisation ... (drama at the last minute ... paper nit typing because the IT dept gave this ... I can imagine the sad face sitting outside one’s office abd who is this computer thing ... we are not accountant we use pen and type it out ...) I have to give up. Wang pc with wang software is the maximum I can do. Can’t remember I get that far.
At least I have not sell them windows 1.0 the tile design in retrospect. Typist scared me in my whole career. :-(
I remember my Dad making a function key template that went over the keyboard and included all of the modifiers. That made unusual commands findable and common commands quickly learnable.
Menus are just slightly less-good at teaching shortcuts, because once you find the item, you click on it; you don't leave the menu and hit the shortcut
The keyboard template itself was a physical copy-protection measure.
So people photocopied them... but they were colour-coded, and you had to faff around cutting it out, sellotaping it together, sticking it to cardboard, trimming it to fit...
So many programs came with function-key templates that some 3rd parties sold little spiral-bound books that sat on the template platform, and you could flip through to the one you needed.
I used to produce absolutely enormous bibliographies of scientific publication for NSF reports from databases. We used to try and write complex macros to format the text properly (not sure if we didn't know about RTF, or whether it was supported?), but it was always slow and painful. Then we found that if we used Find/Replace to put something like a [BeginItalics][EndItalics] code at the end of the title, followed by a [BeginItalics] code at the beginning of the title WP 5.1 would ignore the second [BeginItalics] code and format everything properly. We immediately figured out that we just needed to add tokens in the text and then could format hundreds of pages of text in just a few seconds. Happiness ensued.
See this article: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1616454 (Vintage electronics for trusted radiation measurements and verified dismantlement of nuclear weapons by Moritz Kütt and Alexander Glaser).
I remember having a discussion in the early 2000s about WordPerfect still staying around for various legal use-cases and medical transcriptions. I would have thought these folks would have moved on and something would have been able to fill it’s niche.
Back in the day, my then-law firm was upgrading from DOS to Windows. There were some lawyers who said that of course we should upgrade from WordPerfect for DOS to the Windows version because, after all, WordPerfect was the industry standard for law firms. But the techies among us successfully argued that we shouldn't give a [hoot] what other law firms were using — what mattered was what our clients were using, which our surveys showed was uniformly Microsoft Word for Windows. That proved prescient.
There was a technical reason that WP was used by law firms. When submitting briefs to a court, total word count in a brief is extremely important. WordPerfect counts words in footnotes as part of the document, MSWord did not. This led to one case where the lawyers were being considered for sanctions by submitting a document over the word count limit due to using Microsoft Word.
Look at existing cloning efforts, like WordTsar. Years of work and they're not even really close yet.
Secondly, its virtues are its blinding speed, small size and simplicity. All modern software is the reverse of that, especially the abominations of Electron apps.
Thirdly, your clone couldn't be very close, as WordPerfect is alive and well and owned by Corel. Make it too close and they'll sue.
This is neat! I wish we had more DOS-like applications instead of poor looking Windows and graphical ui that you have to spend ages to navigate with mouse instead of using a number of keyboard shortcuts.
I'm a keyboard-first user, and I don't find, generally speaking, applications to be keyboard-oblivious, although, the exceptions stick out like a sore thumb.
Worst offender is certainly Gnome, which is nothing short than antagonistic. They went as far as disabling mnemonics by default. They removed the fast search in the file manager, in favour of the fancy (and broken) one; keyboard user must use the awkward, inline, one. The file manager also lost the "New folder" shortcut.
Another notable entry is Sublime Text (which is not antagonistic, but somewhat oblivious). Very surprisingly, the file panel doesn't respond to keyboard events. For example, if the user wants to rename a file via keyboard, they're forced to copy the filename, then perform the operation via terminal.
I enjoyed that the site takes a lot of care around providing instructions to technical people, and a lot of those summarize as “start over; follow the instructions as written”.
Getting WP to run on a modern computer is relatively easy compared to being able to use it without the rectangular cheat-sheet that went over your keyboard function keys to tell you what key-combinations to press. <smile>
It was slow then. It's not now, not on even a decade-old PC.
But TBH, the text mode just works, and you can readily tweak DOS on a modern SVGA screen to display 132*50 text or something like that.
I know I'm a heretic for saying it, but I still like MS Word for DOS. It even shows me bold, underline and italics right there on the text screen, rather than making me guess colours like WordPerfect always did.
Do you know, I believe I have a copy in a box somewhere, never installed. I've never managed to get eComStation onto real hardware yet, and I don't really fancy trying to get Warp Server 4.51 onto a 21st century computer.
I was a big OS/2 fan from about 1991-1995, but I'm afraid I defected over to the betas of Windows "Chicago" after the OS/2 2.1 update stopped working with most of my hardware that had been fine on 2.0.
OS/2 2.0 was released in the same month as Windows 3.1. In that era, it was so much better, it was embarrassing.
(Linux 1.0 would not be released for another 2 years yet, and v1.0 of native BSD on x86 -- BSD/OS from BSDi, i.e. still commercial -- for another whole year. Yes, it was possible to run pre-1.0 versions of both -- BSD/OS 0.3 came out in April 1992 as well -- but pre-1.0 Linux was very sketchy and very hard work.)
If IBM had let Microsoft make OS/2 1 a 386 OS (x86-32) instead of a 286 OS, the IT world would have turned out very differently. An OS/2 1.x in 1987 that could multitask DOS apps would have been a big hit.
I suspect Windows 3, FreeBSD etc. and Linux would never have happened. Perhaps the GNU Project would have adopted the BSD-Lite kernel, as it did evaluate but foolishly discarded.
But saying that, OS/2 2 was still a 1980s-style OS, a nightmare of vast config files, special drivers that cost money and came on floppy via international post, building custom modified boot floppies so your hard disk or CD drive controller would be recognised and real major pain.
The desktop was very powerful but very weird and kinda clunky. It's no coincidence that nobody has ever re-implemented the OS/2 Workplace Shell on Linux. Lots of other 1980s OSes -- Acorn's RISC OS; Classic MacOS; AmigaOS; NeXTstep; CDE; yep, all of those exist or existed. WPS? Yeah, no thanks.
PCs would not be able to boot from CDs in a standardised cross-OS way for years to come at this time. Indeed PCs didn't even have a standardised connector for attaching CD-ROMs yet. ATAPI would not be standardised for 6 more years. IDE was for hard disks and nothing else, and even EIDE had not yet appeared. CD-ROMs attached via SCSI (expensive, non-standardised) or on one of 3 or 4 different, nonstandard sound card interfaces (Sony, Mitsumi, Panasonic etc., all different and incompatible).
When NT 3.1 finally appeared, MS had a superb idea: copy the files from floppy or CD onto a DOS FAT partition -- FAT16 only, of course, FAT32 hadn't been invented yet -- and then run a DOS setup program. (This also worked fine for all versions of Win9x, incidentally.) DOS compatibility was relatively easy, thanks to the PC BIOS, which 32-bit OSes couldn't use. Anything would boot DOS off a floppy, and getting CD-ROM extensions or a simple network stack running was easy, especially if you didn't care how much RAM was left over. With a default configuration, you might not have enough memory left over to run any apps, but that didn't matter if all you needed was to copy some files.
So, boot DOS, partition the disk with a small C drive for DOS and the NT installation files. Copy the files on there, boot off the hard disk with no config files at all and run SETUP. It then created the big partition for NT, and in it, built a skeletal copy of the OS to install the rest. Then it installed a bootloader and rebooted the PC. You got a dual-boot menu, picked NT and continued.
This eliminated all the fooling around with making boot media with all the drivers you needed. It was much, much easier and quicker. I provisioned a whole network of client PCs this way once: no CD drives, just DOS and the Novell Netware client. They fetched the NT install files from the fileserver, and NT bootstrapped itself from there.
OS/2 never used this, which was very short-sighted of IBM -- I mean, OS/2 is more closely-related to MS-DOS than NT is. It's perfectly possible to compile DOS apps that can run natively on both MS-DOS, OS/2 1.x (16-bit) and OS/2 2.x (32-bit). They're called "family apps". The Setup program could have been a family app, but nooooooo.
You could install from HD to HD, but you had to boot into OS/2 to start the installation -- meaning that you had to edit the CONFIG.SYS file to tell it where to find the HD copy of the installation files. Could it automatically find them itself? Naw. Could you browse to it? Naw. What would you want to do that for?
I bought OS/2 2.1 as well, and most of my 2.0 drivers stopped working. I lost SVGA mode and I lost my sound card. At that point, I tried the beta of Windows "Chicago" (Windows 4.0, later renamed Windows 95) and it was amazing. It auto-detected my hardware, like magic. I got SVGA mode back, I got sound back, I got long filenames on FAT, and I even got a peer-to-peer network with my flatmate's machine over a Laplink parallel cable. (Networking was an extra-cost addition for OS/2, and later a more expensive special edition, "Warp Connect".)
OS/2 2's multitasking was great, but the OS wasn't all that stable. It was easy to have it running fine but you were locked out, because the input subsystem had crashed. (No networking, so no way to `ssh` in.) Large parts of OS/2 2 were still 16-bit code, too.
Win95's multitasking was as good, and while stability wasn't great, it was at least as good. It had vastly better compatibility with DOS and Windows 3.x drivers and apps.
I defected to the Microsoft camp and never returned. The bloated Win XP was the final straw and made me defect to Linux and Mac OS X on an old, cast-off, free PowerMac, thanks to XPostFacto.
For a writer that isn’t already familiar with WordPerfect, is there a compelling case to learn from scratch in this day and age? (Particularly if already familiar with another powerful editor.)
Boxer works really well as a self-contained executable dosbox app on macos. It’s source is available on github, but I’m not sure they’ve chosen a OSS license model
Who needs a VM? I run it on WINE on Ubuntu. It works perfectly, including installing the service releases. Formatted cut/paste works, I can directly browse my Linux filesystem, it launches in seconds, is blisteringly quick and takes very little RAM.
The only things I can't do are middle-click to paste, and use my Compose key. If you don't do them, you won't even notice it's not a native app.
A decade or so back, I finally got a machine powerful enough to usefully run a VM or 2 without killing foreground performance.
I figured I wanted the lightest-weight version of Windows that would do what I needed, so I tried a bunch: Win95B, Win98SE, NT 3.51, NT 4, Win2K, XP.
9x was eliminated straight away: it could only do 640*480 and didn't have good enough networking to get anything in or out.
NT 3/4 were about as limited but could do better networking.
W2K worked well but couldn't run the VirtualBox guest additions.
So I ended up with TinyXP, which ran in 40MB off the ISO image (although more like 220MB once fully-updated).
There's no point for me having my word-processor in a sealed box. I need to get files in and out. I want to be able to put stuff in Dropbox. I want to be able to get it in and out of LibreOffice and Gmail. I want to start in a Linux text editor, add some info in LibreOffice, save as .DOC and open it in Word to work on the structure. I want to be able to copy the name of the speaker, the talk, the time and subject and paste them direct from my browser into my notes.
It's host integration that means this isn't a toy for the sake of the thing. If I wanted that, I could run Wordsworth under UAE, or Word 5.1 under System 7 in Basilisk.
This is a tool to get work done. For that, I want the host environment to be as invisible as possible.
If you don't, well, fine. But your choices would be useless for me.
WordPerfect for DOS, in the opinion of many knowledgeable users, is still the greatest program ever written. Some of its features have not been matched even by the latest Windows software, and its interface remains unequaled for efficiency and elegance.
Does make one wonder just which features he's talking about here. It's been probably 30 years since I used WP for DOS, so I don't quite remember how it all worked, but I have trouble believing there's anything all that great about it.
Reveal codes was a crutch. There was nothing great about it, no matter how much it's wrapped in a nostalgic haze now. It's basically telling people "we cannot make this wordprocessor work reliably, please code up your text yourself once things go wrong".
And yes, I've used WordPerfect from 4.0 to 7.something on Dos, Windows, various unices and Linux.
So do you think the inspector in modern browsers, or "view source" are a crutch then?
I wholeheartedly disagree with this assertion, and there is absolutely no "nostalgic haze" clouding my vision. While I do agree that sometimes pulling up "reveal codes" could have revealed formatting problems caused by a bug in Wordperfect, the difference between WP and MS Word, was that you could actually DO something quick to fix the problem, rather than in Word, where the answer was often "something is royally screwed up -- you get to start over now".
Word has nothing like it. Word has a filtered view of codes.
WP laid it all bare. Every code and nuance was presented. Nothing was filtered or interpreted. I recovered many a screwed up document that you would just have to redo in Word if it ever got into such a state.
I still miss a real reveal codes in Word.
There was a public outcry for it back in the day and a snotty response from a Microsoft PM - wish I could remember enough details to see if I could find it but I'm convinced MS never really delivered a true reveal codes purely out of spite.
Word Perfect as I recall actually let you directly manipulate those codes though. Think of it a bit like toggling between an edit view and raw HTML.
Personally, I never liked WordPerfect, nor did I use it much. I used a lot of different word processors but mostly ended up standardizing on Microsoft Word (well pre-Windows) for personal use.
> MS Word used to do this. Does it not now? (I don't use Word...)
Are you sure about that? At least since Word 95, it used what you could call a two-dimensional markup system - paragraphs and character formatting was separated, and character formatting could span over paragraph starts and ends.
for example, the formatting codes could say "from character position 5 in paragraph one to character position 2 in paragraph two, set bold to opposite setting of whatever was in the stylesheet of the paragraph". that would be very hard to present in a WP-like 'reveal codes' view (or in HTML, for that matter)
Indeed. The conceptual model of a WordPerfect document is a single stream of text, interspersed with formatting instructions.
That meant, for example, that, after backspacing over a return, you could end up with a paragraph of text with, somewhere in the middle, a “set left margin to 3 cm” instruction, or with multiple conflicting instructions (I think neither was supposed to happen, but all software is buggy). I didn’t use WP, so I wouldn’t know what that meant for the paragraph being laid out. It might have been applied starting at entire paragraph that contained the instruction, at the next paragraph, or immediately.
The ‘raw view’ didn’t only allow you to see the (potential) mess of formatting instructions, but also to edit it.
So, if you knew your way around there, you could fix any problem with documents.
IMO, if WP were less buggy, it probably wouldn’t have needed that mode. I also think its existence put less pressure on WP to fix bugs.
My question was whether MS Word indeed had something similar at some point
As for WP, it's been a long time, but I don't remember having had such paragraph formatting issues needing the raw view. The raw view was mostly useful as WP wasn't really WYSIWYG (but there was some sort of print preview in DOS in 5.1) and there's only so much formatting you can show in text mode.
AFAIK Word (but I never used MS DOS Word, and mostly used Word for Mac) never had something similar. It could, and still can, show invisibles, but that’s a very far cry from showing all formatting instructions.
And as you said, its model is completely different. It doesn’t do formatting instructions inline (WordPerfect:Word is a bit similar to html without any css and html with only css)
"I also think its existence put less pressure on WP to fix bugs."
IMO this is not a good reason to deny users an escape hatch to make fixing problems at least possible. To be fair it depends on what kind of users you care about - if you're building a tool for professionals, I think this should be considered table stakes.
Running WPDOS in a web browser with a cloud storage (well, periodic memory snapshots) would be the best choice for who still wants it today. We already had multiple solutions for vi...
The entire point of this exercise is that it is tiny and blindingly fast.
Running it inside a bloated whole-system emulator, in a bloated failure-prone semi-interpreted language, inside a bloated failure-prone app like any modern web browser, is like proposing replacing a bicycle with a shipping container containing an exercise bike, with a VR headset, mounted on the back of a flatbed articulated truck.
Which has a broken gearbox and no tyres and can only scrape screaming and skidding along the road, enveloped in flames and smoke.
Well, it does solve the problem of backup. Both softwares and hardwares had been and continue to be fragile; it will be a constant problem unless you ditch electronics and go with typewriters (which are indeed fine alternatives).
It's not really true: it's generalising a simple point until it no longer holds.
Yes, all software is complex and fallible. But not all software is equal.
If you strip away half a dozen layers of indirection and translation, and replace gigs of code with hundreds of kilobytes of it, then there are dramatic differences. In performance, in reliability, in robustness, in maintainability, in safety.
WordPerfect for DOS, like all DOS apps, had to run in under 640 KB of usable memory -- 2/3 of a meg -- and it shared that with the OS. However, that OS went through 20 years of development and polishing and it was very solid at the end.
WordPerfect ran on about a dozen different OSes and CPUs, and as such it was very clean, exceptionally thoroughly tested and debugged software.
When you have a honed, polished single-function app -- a word processor and nothing else -- that runs in 200-300KB of memory, that can perform well on an 8MHz CPU, running on a 30-40KB OS that runs well on kit half that speed, and you run it on 21st century hardware, the result achieves a level of performance that is literally impossible with any 21st century OS with all its multitasking and multithreading and millions of lines of poorly-integrated code.
I totally get using vi to write a book or something on an air gapped computer. No distractions. But not sure about WordPerfect. To each their own though.
The important difference (for me) is that a word processor understands proportional font geometries and physical page dimensions, so I can layout the page interactively. For example, I have some text that I want to fit on a single page of A4 in Helvetica 12pt, and I'm willing to edit it until it fits.
I think that's a really hard problem to solve in a text editor, but it's trivial in a word processor.
I also use WordPerfect for DOS, because it's a full-featured word processor that you can use in a terminal (I think the author of this site uses it in graphical mode, but I prefer to use it in an xterm).
Here's a screenshot, notice how WordPerfect knows where the text will wrap.
This runs on what is essentially an emulator, and I expect it to use techniques that rewrites executable memory or does unusual system calls. Malware use similar techniques to hide themselves, and therefore, false positives are to be expected.
These are also very common in size constrained demoscene productions. This especially funny to coders who work really hard to squeeze every single byte out of their production to suggest that they can fit a malware in there.
Word Perfect for DOS has a ton of features that folks normally wouldn't know about like redlining and all kinds of fancy image rendering things (sorry it was > 25 years ago and I can't recollect specifics), law firms had an entire version-control system integrated with it.
Word Perfect was also how I ended up being an actual programmer for money in NYC. I started automating my work at some of these firms with macros and later with some C and Perl code and some of the gigs I had I could just walk in and spend all day on IRC while I'd get paid $20 an hour (which was a lot) for my scripts to run through all the docs they thought I was re-formatting by hand.