Volkswriter Deluxe – One of the first word processors for the IBM PC | Hacker News Reader

Volkswriter Deluxe – One of the first word processors for the IBM PC

computeradsfromthepast.substack.com

38 pointstodsacerdoti20 comments

That ad/cover art. This particular example is eh, somewhat over the top, but: I miss this genre. Back then software (companies) had personality.

It's a similar style to a comic book cover. Definitely more interesting than the Corporate Memphis that has taken over today.

It reminds me of an old school movie poster.

It's art from an era when the art wasn't meant to represent the product in any concrete way.

It's a lot like art from old Atari 2600 games, or text adventures: The product itself had either handfuls of pixels or screenfuls of text. Print that on the box, sucker... These days, the whole culture has changed, and people get annoyed when ads for games show pre-rendered cutscenes with graphics that are merely markedly better than what the game itself can accomplish, as opposed to being in a genre of art your hardware is physically incapable of reproducing.

Same energy, I think: https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Volkswagen-Alive-Step-Step/dp/15...

If you look through old byte magazines from the 70s and 80s there’s a lot of cool ads like this. When 15 vendors were selling upgrade boards for your computer, they had to differentiate somehow.

Wow you weren’t kidding. This particular cover looks opulent.

Does anyone remember ChiWriter?

https://horstmann.com/ChiWriter/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChiWriter

Indeed I do. Bought a copy at my university and used it for Economics assignments.

It was a fair amount on work - I certainly could have hand-written answers more quickly. But I think I got a bump because profs liked not having to decipher my ChiWriter output, which was probably welcome after marking 100 handwritten submissions.

[edit: fixed a typo]

Another word processor of the era to check out is PC-Write which was one of the early shareware success stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-Write

It can be downloaded at WinWorld. https://winworldpc.com/product/pc-write/27

Couldn’t fully try it out on mobile, but Volkswriter does seem available here thanks to archive.org’s emulation efforts:

https://archive.org/details/Volkswriter_3

I remember buying VolksWriter back when it was the simple WP choice on the PC. EasyWriter did suck and I don’t think native WordStar was available yet. I used it through college more or less.

> “The horrors of EasyWriter were such that I decided to write my own word processor to get the book done.”

LOL. A true geek. Just yesterday I was updating my resume, decided to use Markdown and was less than impressed with the various templates and scripts out there. So of course I spent the next couple hours writing up a conversion script to automatically add <sections>'s to the bog standard Markdown-to-HTML pandoc output so I'd have better handles to use to format the doc with css grid (without having to insert all that HTML by hand.)

[Insert related XKCD here.]

<rant>While I'm here... Markdown is the absolute worst POS "standard" ever created. I truly despise it. I do, however, love Typora.io because it's a beautiful, simple rich text editor. But the insanity of using a WYSIWYG editor to output a piece of crap text document with a barely parsable syntax, which I then have to convert and clean up using command line tools to get back to a formatted document is truly fucking moronic.

Why haven't we just solved this problem? We can copy and paste custom colored emojis and Klingon characters between apps and platforms without issues now, but bold, italic, bullets and font sizes are somehow beyond human kind's ability to find an answer? Really? It's just batshit insane. <\rant>

I've been using Markdown for a while and know what you mean. I just came across this article last week: https://opensource.com/article/22/8/drop-markdown-asciidoc. Maybe it could help you.

There's just so much support for Markdown at this point, I've just bit the bullet and used it. RemarkJS has a bunch of plugins, so if you know enough to wire it together it's relatively simple to get decent results customized to your needs. It separates the input from the output and uses a real AST, so maybe it might spur some new ideas for some sort of text+ spec that could be adopted.

The idea of Markdown isn't bad - separate the writing from the design. It's just horribly designed. I'd actually love to see a basic rich text document format based on a very strict subset of HTML with no JS, extremely limited CSS and basic tags - created for reading and writing, unlike most web pages - but still compatible with the full spec. Like an editable ePub or mobi format.

For anyone who happens upon this later, after finishing the resume, I was unpleasantly surprised to find out the CSS printing rules for page breaks don't work with CSS grid, making printing a PDF a nightmare.

Unicode denied the request for Klingon characters to appear in the standard.

Heh. I stand corrected! I think I saw that was going to happen but didn't realize that cooler heads prevailed.

IBM’s EasyWriter, which was mentioned in the article, was written by John Draper in Forth. He wrote it during the day, and at night he would report back to prison to serve out a sentence for phone phreaking.

Oh man I grew up in VW3. I knew no one else outside of my family and the facility at my dad’s university department that even heard of it.

It would be nice with screenshots tho.

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