Re: Apple II Celebration (was: Re: FS: APPLE IIGS)

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article pubpc1@library.ucla.edu writes...

>Joe, consider AppleWorks GS v1.1, available for $15 from Alltech
>Electronics (http://www.allelec.com/).  It has a full-featured
>word processor that supports fonts, multiple rulers, has a wonderful
>dictionary and thesaurus, handles files of over 100K with ease,
>and version 1.1 is quite stable. 
                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^

    I would tend to disagree when talking about the word-processor
module. I used to use AppleWorks GS 1.1 heavily back in college a
few years ago, for writing long term-papers and essays. I can't
tell you how many times it would lock up or freeze, causing me to
lose HOURS of work and thought. Another thing it would do, was 
suddenly bring up a dialog box with two options "-->RESTART" and
"Other Button" (not very pleasant, since it was as good as a lock
up, but you got a dialog to reboot the computer). 

    This happened when my system was running with 2 MB of RAM. 
Oh, and my brother had a separate IIgs running with 1.25 MB of
RAM and it too would constantly freeze-up when running AWGS 1.1
(I remember my sister borrowing the machine to do some work for
school and being a little ticked off that the computer had "ate"
it; she was using AWGS of course). I've seen countless other 
reports about it freezing up in the same way, the program is/was
very, very buggy. Even to this day it is rather unstable running
on my 5 MB system with a hardrive. I use AWGS for light work,
like typing up short letters or printing envelopes (and even
then have had it freeze). 

    Actually my favorite word-processor is the built-in editor
in ProTERM 3.1 (despite it lacking a spell-checker and having
that annoying 45K limit). That is stable, and much easier and
nicer to use than AppleWorks Classic. Plus ProTERM follows the
Apple GUI standard so cutting and pasting, etc is just as it
would be in GS/OS or on a Mac (right down to key-equivalent
shortcuts). I really wish I could convince InTrec to expand the
editor into a full-featured word processor. :)

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca