back then it were large ships. Today the issue is building large Starships. How many would we need to move several millions people and various equipment to Mars. May be not ice - though ice should work if building in space (or on the Moon). And ice can be oxidizer if aluminum is used as fuel, so you just burn large part of your ship too. For building on Earth - something cheap and easy to shape. Say 3D sinter-printering from sand.
It's essentially saying that you start with an outline, then progressively fill in the sections, iterating and providing more detail at each iteration. I do something similar, which is why I prefer to work in outline mode (e.g. in MS Word) as it is the most flexible and "minimalist" mode for structured writing.
He would still have made use of the MS BASIC license, but the addition of the Simons' BASIC cartridge in the box from 1983 onward would have changed the lives of many hobby coders.
That doesn't make UncleSlacky incorrect. Tramiel was obsessed with reducing COGS and thus retail price, and bulldozed down anything standing in his way.
A more interesting possibility is the post-Tramiel Commodore including a ROM version of GEOS from 1986 onward, and selling it on cartridge form to existing customers.
Other possibilities:
* Launch Amiga 2000 and 500 in 1985 instead of 1000.
* Eschew Amiga completely, in favor of the Commodore 900 with Coherent. Instead of Amiga silicon, ship with a "VIC-III" for graphics and two SIDs for stereo 6-channel sound.
You'd have to find a suitable editor. For a long time I had a copy of Wordperfect 4.x which I'd fire up occasionally under either DOSEmu or FreeDOS. Among other disappointments:
- I've forgotten virtually all my WP muscle-memory. Vim is where it's at. (I was once quite proficient at WP, but the last time I used it significantly was well over 30 years ago.)
- I find DOS apps tend to play poorly with any screen resolution other than 80x24 or so. I prefer more information density, but even running a console (rather than a terminal app) the experience tends to be subpar.
That said, for someone with familiarity with the apps and not too picky about resolution, that's an option.
When I saw this post I immediately thought of WordPerfect.
It had such a pleasant interface for that time.
But yeah, one of the things made me go for vim over Emacs a long time ago was its relationship with touch typing and not leaving the home row with the vim modes.
Learn Vim script the hard way [1], even if you didn't end up writing any actual vim script, was a game changer in terms of understanding the semantics.
I built that USB-DOS tool and it contains a wide choice of word processors, from plain text editors with the WordPerfect command keys, to full-on professional tools, plus a choice of outliners and also a spreadsheet for the sort of writer who needs to model stuff -- like Andy Weir or John Barnes, to pick two I rather like.
I've used a long list of editors and word processors over the years, including WordStar (included in USB-DOS). My problem isn't that there aren't editors, that they aren't included with the distribution, or that they cannot be otherwise obtained and installed. It's that they're not suitable, given my needs, experience, and preferences. For me.
I've well over 40 years muscle memory devoted to vi/vim. I like and prefer its plain-text approach, modality, and (as vim / neovim) syntax highlighting, regex text manipulation, piping filters, additional features, plugins, and the like. I've gone back to older tools from time to time ... and they simply don't measure up nor would their charms be worth the transition pain.
Amongst my dead-editor menagerie, for what it's worth: DOS Edit, EDLIN, EDT and EVE (VAX), the TSO/ISPF editor (VMS), MacWrite, MS Word, WordStar, AmiWrite, MS Word, Applixware, StarOffice and successors (OpenOffice, NeoOffice, etc.) emacs, Joe, ae, pico, and probably a few others lost to memory's dust. Some of those are still available, many are not, and one lesson I've come to is that learning non-expiring tools pays off in the long run.
Vim's where it's at for me, and so long as I'm running vim its integration and usefulness with the rest of the Linux / Unix userland precludes DOS.
If all you're doing is editing text, then DOS plus a suitable word processor could well work. Speaking for myself, and only myself, of course, it doesn't.
OK, fair enough. I first learned Vi on SCO Xenix in 1988 and I instantly hated it, and 38 years later, I still do.
About 2-3Y into my career, IBM CUA came along and transformed DOS software: everything got a new CUA UI. Word 5, proprietary UI; Word 5.5, CUA. WordPerfect 4, proprietary UI; WP 5, CUA.
Since then, if an editor isn't CUA, life is too short: I won't even consider it.
There's a standard PC UI. All Linux GUIs follow it more or less, except for the ones that intentionally chose to Do Something Else, to Be Different for Difference's Sake. (GNOME, Elementary, a few others.)
It's time the shell/console world caught up.
Leave the old one as an option for the old timers. Everyone else gets CUA by default.
My first experience, on a BSD machine at about the same time, was similarly traumatic.
I've since learnt the tool. Its ubiquity (particularly over pretty much all of the other ones I'd listed, at least on the machines I had ready access to) cemented that.
I did like EVE when I'd used it, but have had little access to VAXen since. And was proficient for a time on Emacs (until a subsequent gig's director insisted that if it didn't come installed software wouldn't be added to our Unix server). My WP-fu fell with the end of DOS, though I did hang on for quite some time, up to the late 1990s / early aughts.
CUA has its benefits, but it is only one of multiple competing keyboard standards. Everything is convention.
Oddly: I'm vi/vim in the editor, but readline on the shell. No, I don't set vimkeys bindings in Bash. But I do drop to bash as my shell editor.
Also: for those stumbling across this thread later, "Mastering the Vim Language" is an excellent video I'd come across in my third decade of using the editor, and learned much from. It's now 11 years old itself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete
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