Word Processors on the Commodore VIC-20 (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Word Processors on the Commodore VIC-20 (2021)

techtinkering.com

24 pointsmu0n15 comments

Interesting that there was a port of Speedscript to the VIC-20. That was a word processor originally published in Compute! magazine and ported to most 6502-based computers (and MS-DOS, but that was a rewrite in Turbo Pascal as the original was in 6502 assembly language). That probably would have been the best option for the VIC-20 -- Speedscript was a pretty amazing program for something published in a magazine and was better than many word processors for sale in the 1980s.

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

It's topic drift, but referencing WP software from that era always reminds me of my OWN experience then.

In junior high and high school, my computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer II. We did not have a floppy drive; we used a cassette player instead. SOME software -- games, mostly -- was available on cassette, too, but my word processor was on a cartridge, like an Atari game.

This was, at the time, my first and only exposure to word processing software.

Then, in my junior year of high school (86-87), I was on the annual staff, and we had an IBM PCjr in the office for our use. It had dual floppies -- the height of luxury, or so I thought.

Imagine my shock and dismay when I found that performance in the word processor (moving between modes, say) was AGONIZINGLY SLOW compared to my much-less-fancy TRS-80. See, the word proc on the PC was on a floppy, and so reading other bits of the program meant hitting that fairly slow bus. At home, though, it was on a ROM slotted into the main board, and so everything within the program was basically instant.

Also topic drift, but very similar to yours: i'm 2 or 3 years older, had an Atari 800 at home courtesy of my mom, but couldn't save enough to buy a cassette drive via lawn mowing, so would write down or re-enter whatever between parent turning on the light switch in the room so i could see, not realizing they turned off the computer instead. The IBM PC came out; I got my dad to sell a fancy shotgun bought for me at birth, in the newspaper classifieds, and used the money to get a PC. On that PC i had an early version of Word...and it was super useful.

I have seldom been as proficient in any application as I was in Word for DOS. I could FLY through that interface!

same!

Pretty sure it was vicwriter I used to write and submit assignments in elementary school. Got "permission" to do homework this way because my handwriting was so terrible it was presenting a roadblock for learning.

Then again "Quick Brown Fox" also looks familiar. Funny how the key bindings are very similar to vi (and also inspired by ed I guess)

I love retro computing and have used retro systems for contemporary work. This said, the VIC 20 has a horrendous font that I couldn't handle even back in the day. I think DOS with the standard PC font is vastly superior for retro word processing (especially with WordPerfect!)

Absolutely agree. There's a huge advantage to working on a pre-internet computer for word processing, in terms of being able to focus.

But the VIC-20 screen is painful to look at. Personally, I use an Apple //e with WordStar.

It's not like your work was going to look good on a 9 dots per inch matrix printer. Fonts were a feature printers had. Computers didn't have fonts then. They had a single, highly pixelated font built into the firmware. Which wasn't the same font your printer had. No bold. No Italic. No different sizes. Definitely no wysiwyg. Some printers had some of those features. Some even had more than one font.

I had the commodore 64 which had a bit more memory than the VIC-20. But still, a few pages of text in ascii was about the max you could manage with that (a few thousand words at best). These things weren't that great for word processing. Also features like "saving" and tapes as the main storage medium made using them slightly risky.

> It's not like your work was going to look good on a 9 dots per inch matrix printer.

Hmmmm... I don't remember the exact matrix printer I had (some Epson probably) and it wasn't 8-bit but 16-bit era but I remember making very nice (for the time) D&D character sheets on the Amiga. Sure it wasn't a 1200 DPI laser printer but it was still cool.

The Apple ImageWriter II was a 9-in dot-matrix printer and already allowed to print nice things.

Yes, but by manually managing the dots most like, and probably doing a second pass --- the default fonts on hardware were not that great aesthetically.

GEOS - and especially GeoWrite - on the Commodore 64 was a revelation. It was wysiwyg (albeit at fixed zoom) and used bitmap fonts which printed just about acceptably on my Citizen 120D 9-pin dot matrix.

The only thing it couldn't do was shingling to increase the apparent resolution/density of the prints.

It was 9 pin not 9dpi, yes it looked awful. 24-pin (2 rows of 12) was a pretty big improvement, even more noisy though.

> Fonts were a feature printers had.

I remember the Juki daisy wheel we had hooked to our AT&T PC6300 running the Q&A word processor. I think you could buy different type faces but my father only ever bought the standard typewriter font.

The Citizen 200GX dot matrix we had afterward was a game changer especially with the color ribbon kit and the ability to print color graphics from paint in Win 3.1 was amazing.

This makes me nostalgic for tractor feed paper - both of the above printers had the tractor feeder option. My father bought a friggin skid of tractor feed on the cheap in the 80's for home and business so for years we had infinite paper supply until lasers and ink jets did away with tractor feeding.

I used to word-process on the VIC for school assignments... and let me tell you the font was the least of my concerns...

20 column text was. Dear god. So awful.

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