[Leica] Wordstar

[lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

Jim writes:
"I worked on a proposal for a government contract about 20 years ago, and

all of our work had to be done in Word Perfect, in a common format, so

that all of the parts could be rolled up together into a final document.  I

suspect that also goes on in legal offices.  ( I had to learn WP from

scratch, because, at the time, I had been using WordStar.)


Of course, it may be that legal secretaries like to continue with the

software that they learned when computers were first introduced into the

workplace."

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Jim,

The legal profession moves at a truly glacial pace in adopting new
technology. Twenty five years ago I was playing around with my new Mac, a
first generation 128 MB model. Apple established a consortium that enabled
educators to buy Macs before the general public got their hands on them. All
you had to do was pay the $2500 purchase price up front and the computer
would be delivered in a couple of months. Sort of what Hitler did for the
Volkswagen. With enough orders and cash in hand the computers would be
manufactured and delivered.

Anyway the Mac was an eye opener. Within 15 minutes of taking it out of the
box my 8 year old daughter was making pictures with MacDraw. A year later I
upgraded it to a Mac 512 and with all that memory could write papers in Word
1.0 and do spreadsheets in Excel, both programs originally developed for the
Mac. After Microsoft bought both programs, support for the Mac was gradually
withdrawn.

I've used just about all the word processing programs that have come to
market and, in my opinion, the cleanest and the best was Write Now, a
program written in machine language for the Motorola 6800 processor used on
the original Macs. It has a very small footprint, is blazingly fast, and
produces high quality documents. It will work on any Mac that supports a
6800 emulator up to OS 9. Unfortunately the newer Intel Macs won't run it.

Larry Z