Larry Blanchard wrote:

Greg G. wrote:


BBS's and PC bridge software to ARPANET were the norm for us.
Ah, yes. I (barely) remember $450 300baud modems, Windows 1.0, the
GEM GUI, CP/M, $2,000 dollar 10 meg hard drives, IBM BIOS lawsuits,
FTL and Robert Voysteres, Heathkit, DRDOS, FIDOnet, the DEC Rainbow,
RHIME and PCRelay. Man, I feel old...


Hah! When you start remembering Univac, Ramac, IBM650s, Readix, and
yes, plugboards, THEN you can feel old :-). I'm 68.

And I don't remember what I paid for my first 8" floppy drive, but I
remember it put a hole in my computing budget for a while :-).

66 here. My first computer was a Burroughs E101, externally programmed,
about the size of a desk and did about as much.
creak,
jo4hn

Contrarian said:

Greg G. wrote:

I learned WordStar as my first real word processor, and the keyboard
mapping allowed me to emulate it quite well. I despised WordPerfect
and those annoying, inconsistent function key mappings. While there
may have been a way around it, I never used it enough to find out.


FYI: jstar, which comes with many Linux distros and is
on this account's FreeBSD system, is Joe Allen's joe
wordstar mode. Free. GPL

jstar(1): Joe's Own Editor - Linux man page
http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man1/jstar.1.html

There's a lot of really well written software available GPL/GNU.
Our customers all run MS systems, however, so we have to concentrate
on that realm of bizarreness.

Robert Sawyer's agrees with you on WordPerfect
WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor
URL: http://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

Never thought about it enough to write an essay on the subject, but I
agree with what he says. I am embarrassed to admit that most of my
work is done on MS systems, and I find myself spending more time
looking at the keyboard to find those insipid function keys these days
than actually typing. ;-)

Thanks for the info,


Greg G.

Larry Blanchard (in ) said:

| Odinn wrote:
|
||| Right! I finally remembered the company (Ecosoft) but not the
||| compiler name.
|||
||
|| Ecosoft was EXPENSIVE, and had a nasty habit of crashing while
|| compiling if you had a syntax error in your code instead of just
|| reporting the syntax error.
|
| We're really getting into off-topic old, old history here, but I
| can't resist one more comment.
|
| You must have had an earlier version than I did. I remember Aztec
| C as very reliable on my S100 buss CP/M system. I don't recall it
| being expensive, but since I have no record of my purchase you may
| be right there.

Ecosoft and Aztec were separate producers. I bought Eco-C and
regretted the purchase. I backed up and stuck with Ron Cain's Small-C
until Borland finally came out with TurboC (I still have all three of
the original compilers and the T-shirt Borland sent to help purchasers
feel better about having to wait three months for delivery).

IIRC, Ecosoft was located in Indianapolis and Aztec was on one coast
or the other...

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/solar.html

On 12/22/2005 11:52 AM Larry Blanchard mumbled something about the
following:
Odinn wrote:

Right! I finally remembered the company (Ecosoft) but not the
compiler name.

Ecosoft was EXPENSIVE, and had a nasty habit of crashing while
compiling if you had a syntax error in your code instead of just
reporting the syntax error.

We're really getting into off-topic old, old history here, but I can't
resist one more comment.

You must have had an earlier version than I did. I remember Aztec C as
very reliable on my S100 buss CP/M system. I don't recall it being
expensive, but since I have no record of my purchase you may be right
there.



Ummm, Aztec is not Ecosoft Manx Aztec C was plenty good, and wasn't
that expensive. BDS was pretty good, but was a bit non-standard until
version 1.6 or something like that. Of course, the big player was
Lattice (who later sold out to Microsoft). Then there was Wizard, which
Borland bought and turned into Turbo C, Borland's C (before they bought
Wizard) became Top Speed, Mix who later created Power C, Datalight which
became Zortech which became Symantec and somehow ended as Think C (or at
least a portion of it), and not to mention a couple of others that just
disappeared like DeSmet and Whitesmiths

--
Odinn - still has his copies of Manx, Power, and Turbo C, just nothing
to run them on.

Morris Dovey wrote:

Ecosoft and Aztec were separate producers. I bought Eco-C and
regretted the purchase.

Ouch - my memory is failing. Yes, the Ecosoft product was Eco-C. I
must have had some aquaintance with Aztec-C or I wouldn't have gotten
them confused.

Was Aztec-C complete K&R? Double precision and all? I know Eco-C was -
that was their big claim to fame.

--
It's turtles, all the way down

In article ,
Larry Blanchard wrote:
Odinn wrote:

Right!**I*finally*remembered*the*company*(Ecosoft) *but*not*the
compiler name.


Ecosoft was EXPENSIVE, and had a nasty habit of crashing while
compiling if you had a syntax error in your code instead of just
reporting the syntax error.

We're really getting into off-topic old, old history here, but I can't
resist one more comment.

You must have had an earlier version than I did. I remember Aztec C as
very reliable on my S100 buss CP/M system. I don't recall it being
expensive, but since I have no record of my purchase you may be right
there.

Ecosoft was _not_ the same as "Aztec C". Aztec C was put out by "Manx
Software Systems", and existed for a whole variety of platforms.
8080/Z-80 under CP/M, 808x under MSDOS _and_ CP/M-86. Apple II under ProDOS,
at least. I think there was a CP/M-68K version as well.
And, they had _cross-compilers_ -- which would run on one type of box, and
produce executables for a different kind of box.

Aztec C did vary in price, depending on what capabilities you needed.
Cross-compilers were more expensive than 'native' only.
the ability to create "ROM-able code", and the ability to create true
'stand-alone' programs (*no* operating-system services required), were
also things you paid extra for.

In article ,
Larry Blanchard wrote:
Morris Dovey wrote:

Ecosoft and Aztec were separate producers. I bought Eco-C and
regretted the purchase.

Ouch - my memory is failing. Yes, the Ecosoft product was Eco-C. I
must have had some aquaintance with Aztec-C or I wouldn't have gotten
them confused.

Was Aztec-C complete K&R? Double precision and all? I know Eco-C was -
that was their big claim to fame.

I don't know for sure about CP/M. but on MS-DOS (_and_ Apple II!!) the
'native' floating-point numbeers were 8-bytes long. and were called type
'double'.

I think Aztec _might_ have lacked "enumerated bitfields", but thats about
the only piece of the K&R spec that I didn't (ab)use. I could take
practically anything that compiled on my real UNIX box, and Aztec C would
compile it without complaining.

I *LIKED* Aztec C. It generated tight code, and minimal overhead in
the executables (pulled in only routines actually used from a library,
rather than including the _entire_ library, for example)

They were, unfortunately, very slow in coming out with an 'ANSI' compiler.
or an IDE, and the market bypassed them.

Greg G. wrote:
Contrarian did inform this forum thusly:

http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man1/jstar.1.html

Thanks for the info,

Gnoppix. Ubuntu. Uhuru!

"Contrarian" wrote in message
o.verio.net...

Greg G. wrote:
Contrarian did inform this forum thusly:

http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man1/jstar.1.html

Thanks for the info,

Gnoppix. Ubuntu. Uhuru!

Hey, guys! Please work out a way to take my name off this thing. I keep
looking to see what might be wanted, and I don't even know what you're
writing about some 93% of the time.