Re: Apple and the Holy War

[pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <AIET4.995$W45.1521@newsfeed.slurp.net>,
Forrest <bctimes@hotmail.com> wrote:
 
> Somewhere, pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:
> 
>>> Somewhere, pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:
>>> 
>>>>Why the 78 chars/line limit?
>>> 
>>> Because that's what RJLissner picked.
>> 
>> Why did he do that?
> 
> You'd have to ask him.  Possibly to accommodate standard manuscript format 
> with two spaces after a sentence.
 
Thanks for your informative answer.... :-(
 
>> That's a display issue, not an editor issue.  Sometimes I encounter
>> text files from the outside, with line lengths exceeding 80 or even
>> 255 characters.  Why should a good editor puke at such a text file?
> 
> There's a difference between wrapping lines and "puking".
 
If lines are wrapped, no line limit has been reached.  The line limit
is reached when the editor pukes, or does nasty things like silently
truncating the line at the limit.
 
If hard line wraps are inserted, you have a problem though: what was
one line in the original text then suddenly becomes two or more
lines.  This may be OK for running text, but is often a disaster for
data files.
 
> There's also a difference between a word processor and a text editor.
 
Wordstar was both.  Any word processor having an ASCII mode is both.
 
>>> Never used AppleWorks, have you?
>> 
>> Nope ... I've played with it one or twice but obviously I wasn't
>> impressed, or else I would nave continued using it.  Now I hardly
>> remember anything about it.
> 
> Everyone else was,
 
Please don't make such a claim, because it's almost certainly false.
I'm positive there was, on planet Earth, at least one other person
except me who wasn't impressed by Appleworks.
 
> which is why it debuted at #2 on the Softalk Top Thirty its 
> first month, permanently moved to #1 the month after, and became the best 
> selling Apple II program of all time -- all with no advertising.  At all.
> For about six years.
> 
> As Tom "Uncle DOS" Weishaar put it, it was/is "as important a characteristic
> of the Apple II as DOS, Applesoft, or the [System] Monitor."
 
OK -- however I choose software after my own preferences, not after
what happens to be #1 in some bestseller list.
 
Perhaps I should also remind you that, to me, CP/M was the OS I did
my serious stuff on, on the Apple II.  I used Apple DOS mostly for
playing games, and for poking around in the (6502 part of) the Apple
II.  I readily admit that this gave me a negative bias against any
"productivity package" on Apple DOS.  But this bias originated with
some early negative experiences with Apple DOS: I once tried to
create a data file (as a text file) on DOS 3.2.  I was forced to
split up the file in two parts - why?  Because DOS 3.2 imposed an
upper limit of 32000 bytes on any file - including text files !!!
 
As soon as the SoftCard was released, I moved over to CP/M, where
this stupid 32000 byte size limit didn't exist: there I could easily
create data files spanning the entire free space of the disk.  And I
could also choose if I wanted my data file to be a text file or a
binary file.
 
About a year later, I got DOS 3.3, where this stupid 32000 size
limit had been removed -- but by then I had already moved on
to CP/M for my serious stuff.
 
-- 
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Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Grev Turegatan 40,  S-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
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