How to Use Classic Amiga for Word Processing Today | Hacker News Reader

How to Use Classic Amiga for Word Processing Today

amigalove.com

50 pointserickhill18 comments

This is obviously a fine route to go if you want, but I've found simply booting into a text-mode Linux on its own partition (or something equivalent) gets the job done just as well, and means I don't have to have a bulky out-of-date machine just for creative writing. Going this route also means your creative writing workshop is portable, has wonderful battery life, and is trivial to backup--things I didn't have when I briefly tried hipstering myself with AppleWorks on a IIGS.

As a bonus, when whatever I'm writing is actually technical stuff that I need the Internet for (e.g. a post I've been working on about a one-stop enterprise Mercurial server setup), I can have exactly the same storage location and document creation/publishing workflow, but work from my normal, fully graphical session. I'm all for using the no-distractions mode for writing things that don't require research, but I think it's equally important to acknowledge that a lot of stuff most of the HN crowd writes every day require an Internet-connected research station with rich media support, and having that station be something I can cut and paste out of (as opposed to e.g. an external iPad or Android tablet) is a boon to my productivity, not a curse.

In the weekend when I am home I try to do my normal work on a 1986 msx-2 running Symbos. It actually workd quite well. I cheat a bit by having 512kb (soldered in myself which I am still proud of), a network card and compactflash card reader but the MSX runs at 3.58mhz and most things I need to do work on it. It is absolutely crazy what the creator of Symbos gets out of this limited machine. If that had happened in the 80s we might have had a very different history.

I run a computer museum and try to educate visitors on the history of computers by actually using the old systems and seeing that fundametally it is not so different or in; it is not magic what computers do.

I don't think users of outdated word processors are just using them for simplicity's sake, usually they're real power users of whatever software they're using, the fact that it's an old DOS/Win 3.1/whatevs program is not the whole raison d'etre of it, although I guess the "distraction free" environment might help a bit.

If it's just about the latter, a non-networked Amiga without games might suffice, but if it's also about word processor-fu, does the Amiga actually have something unique that's in a league of XyWrite or WordStar? A real reason to pull out the A500, instead of heading for e.g. iaWriter/WriteRoom (for the distraction-free) or Emacs/Scrivener (for the feature-focused).

I was part of a fairly large cult following of Wordstar that continued to use it after supposedly better GUI based word processors came along.

The key bindings and traversal were very well thought out, and once you got into the groove, it was more efficient than anything I've used before or since.

A write up on the subject that says it better than I can: http://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

And, yes...I can't see why an Amiga would be a plus in a pure editing scenario. Sharp monochrome would have been the right environment for word processing at the time, which was not the Amiga's forte.

Ouch, Amiga with its flickering interlaced screen was never a good 'productivity' machine because it was painful to look at higher resolution documents. Its competitor, the Atari ST, had a high quality paper white monochrome monitor at 640x400 that was much better for those type of applications. And it was cheaper.

Amiga was definitely by far the better games and graphics machine tho.

EDIT: Had written 640x480, meant to write 640x400

640x400 - since 640*400/8=32000. The ST always had 32,000 bytes of display memory. (edit: I dawdled over my reply while doing multiple nostalgic google searches, and my correction is now redundant)

I don't know what they did to make the mono monitor look so nice. It was only 70Hz, and it only did black OR white, but it was completely flicker-free, like an LCD. But unlike an LCD - at least an LCD in the 1990s - there was no blur; unlike the then-popular passive-matrix LCDs, there were no crosstalk streaks; and unlike your average 1990 colour CRT, assuming you could find one that ran at 70Hz, there was no visible flicker even to my teenager's eyes.

Focus round the edges was pretty bad though, at least on the model I had. The options appeared to be "pin-sharp stamp-sized display with a massive border" or "nice big screen with blurred edges".

It doesn't really compare very well to anything modern, but you're right that it was streets ahead of 640x512 interlaced on the Amiga, and I don't care how many colours that would have been.

Not that I ever saw one, but there was the Amiga 2024 monitor. Supposedly it had less flicker and also higher resolution. http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=...

I still have one. It does 1024x1024 in 50Hz or 1024x800 in 60Hz. 4 greyscale tones.

Very good monitor for the time.

I loved my SM125 monitor with those rare properly designed GEM applications that showed off the potential of the GUI.

A shame GDOS didn't ship with the original distribution of the OS and a shame that Atari wasn't better at getting developers to produce quality GEM applications.

It could have been a Mac killer.

Indivision ECS will correct the flicker for OCS and ECS Amigas. I have one and it works flawlessly:

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php...

Of course, you could connect an Amiga (1200, though) to a VGA monitor with a simple modified cable. I did it with a nice old VGA mono monitor and it was great.

The article said 'classic amiga' :-)

ECS chipset Amigas could output VGA too.

I've found myself intrigued by the idea of "antique computing," though I'm not sure why someone would advocate the Amiga specifically.

I have considered a project that involves getting an older, though not ancient, PC, installing FreeDOS (http://www.freedos.org/) as the OS and running say, WordPerfect 5.1.

I've been considering getting a Pentium II thinkpad and going all Debian 3.0 on it, KDE2 and probably StarOffice something. Not as antique, but there is USB and thus Wi-Fi or cabled ethernet.

I personally would feel that using something like KDE and StarOffice would be already way beyond the complexity cliff that defines modern computing, and as such for me it would be almost same to use modern versions. Of course your mileage might vary.

If there really are people who would love to use the classic Amiga for word processing (in the sense of modern features) why don't they simply start an open source project for this purpose?

If the author is reading this: You spelled the name of the word processor software wrong: WordWord instead of WordWorth.

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