I found a manual for one similar for the C64 in the garage, as I looked at the feature list, I thought, pretty much everything you use for Msft Word and similar - all on a 1 MB floppy right?
It's amazing what could be done back in the day, and how much money and time and disk space is used these days to do just a bit more.
> pretty much everything you use for Msft Word and similar - all on a 1 MB floppy
Somewhere in my pile of not-quite-abandonware I have a copy of the install floppies for Microsoft Word 5.1a for Macintosh, circa 1988/89. All three of them -- and the last one held the spelling checker dictionaries.
IIRC you could run Word off floppy, although ideally it wanted 2-4Mb of disk space. And it had most of the features we associate with Word today, including full WYSIWYG -- the only significant omission was Word BASIC. which showed up in Word 6. (Word 6 was a bit of a mess -- bloated from 3 floppies to 20, ran sluggishly, broke all sorts of UI guidelines -- because MS's Mac developers got downsized and in the end Word 6 on the Mac was Word 6 for Windows with some sort of Windows-to-Mac compatibility shim that didn't work terribly well.)
(I wrote my first published -- non-fiction -- book with Word 5.1 for MacOS.)
I had Word on three disks for the Amiga, yes the disks were 880K each, but Microsoft figured out how to use it all. I design and built a three drive enclosure to add to my Amiga (The Amigas could support 4 drives) and not having to swap disks while you worked or printed made a big different in ease of use.
Back then the disk capacities were only 170 kB (5.25") on a single side of a disk. Pretty crazy. And the actual word processor in the article - written in machine language - was only 25K. Most user avatars or site logos on the web these days probably come close to the same size. Hah!
On the other hand, if you look at those 8 bit word processors, the reason why PCs were considered "serious" is quite apparent. Going from a C64 word processor to e.g. early versions of WordStar is quite a jump. After that, not a lot of really interesting things happened in that area. Embedding tables and collaborative editing maybe.
(Although I haven't worked with a C128 WP, the 80 column mode should at least bring graphical fidelity to the same high level…)
It’s more like almost everything from the old WordPerfect. I think if you actually try using this you’ll quickly notice the limitations, no tables, no fonts, no graphics and very little usability.
I can't answer for this one, but the laser printers used to have some fonts built in you could switch between, and it looks like it had tables, if the printed documentation is anything to go by.
It only appears to support fixed width text with super or subscript or double width text for emphasis. No sizing etc. And of course you aren’t going to be able to fit unicodes 65k+ characters in 16k of memory.
It supports text blocks for basic dtp purposes, but there are no commands for tables.
"And of course you aren’t going to be able to fit unicodes 65k+ characters in 16k of memory."
I'd love to see "Someone" do a breakdown on a modern "bloated" program, albeit something written in C or something (i.e., not "Electron") compared to an 8-bit program, with an eye to that sort of thing. Some of our "bloat" is understandable; you want at least some fraction of unicode. Variable-width fonts are nice. On a 64-bit machine, 64-bit words are fairly natural for numbers and that ends up taking up substantially more space than an 8-bit value, but it's definitely nice to not have things arbitrarily limited to 255 everywhere.
Something like a relatively barebones vi vs. The Write Stuff, or maybe nano or some other baby editor.
