Re: Apple and the Holy War

[pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <dJmT4.101$W45.327@newsfeed.slurp.net>,
Forrest <bctimes@hotmail.com> wrote:
 
> Somewhere, supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) wrote:
> 
>>> Could you edit a 1 MByte file on AppleWorks?
>>
>> I am pretty certain you can.  You would need greater than
>> 1MB on your Apple II though.
> 
> Maximum of 250 pages per document x 66 lines x 78 characters maximum gives us 
> a theoretical maximum AWP document size of 1,287,000 bytes.  Go to 
> 14-inch-long pages and that goes up a bit.
 
Why the 78 chars/line limit?  Wordstar allowed up to 255 characters
per line -- yes, it had horisontal scrolling.  It also allowed you to
edit in either "document mode", where the text was divided in pages
and was formatted between margins, or in "text mode" when it just
edited simple ASCII text with no document formatting whatsoever.
 
> However, due to drawbacks in the design of the AW memory manager* you'll need 
> much more than that -- there's a maximum number of chunks possible and the 
> size of a chunk increases as the overall size of memory does.  Probably 8 megs 
> will do it.  Randy Brandt managed to break that barrier in Deja II on the Mac 
> (leaving me to wonder why it couldn't be done on the original...too late now I 
> suppose).
> 
> That notwithstanding, if there's a more usable, more useful, better designed 
> and more efficient general-purpose application than AW5.1 around I don't know 
> what it is.
 
Pick any word processor which allows more than 78 chars/line.....  I
would certainly not call a word processor imposing such a 78-char
limit as "most usable, most useful, best designed"..... the only
advantage it offers is more efficiency, since horizontal scrolling
need not be implemented on 80-col text screens.
 
-- 
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