A vintage word processor

[ral-clan]

I've actually done some typesetting with moveable lead type and a flatbed press, all inked and pressed manually. No university essays though!

[carlsson]

I wrote a small paper on march music and composers in my music class using Text 64 (Handic), printed on my MPS-801. I used a photocopier to insert images. When the teacher saw my paper, he told me flat out that it was not satisfactory. He would give a low score, only because it was just a few pages long and printed with an UGLY matrix printer. For comparison, he showed me some previous student essays written by hand, typewriter or printed on a modern (1992) printer, and told me those were quality papers.

What he did miss though, is that while my paper on march music consisted of several sources, carefully cross-verified and merged together, the example essays about The Beatles, Elvis etc were copied verbatim from encyclopedias and biographies. How could I tell? Well, which 15-16 year old student writes a 5 page essay on The Beatles and goes on like this?

On Tuesday morning March 6th 1963, Paul picked up John at his home at 10 AM. Then they drove to the music studio. John said:

-"Oh, it is is a beautiful day. Let's write a song about it."

Paul agreed, and so the first bars of "It is a beautiful day" took form.

blah blah blah.. material blatantly stolen from uncredited biography goes on and on

Apparently the teacher was good at superfictional validation, but had major flaws in evaluating the text and look up potential cheating.

Anyway in the end, he changed his mind and gave me 4+ on a scale with maximum 5, after reading through my text. Wow. It must've been a first for him.

[ral-clan]

That's a good story. So often people are all about the package and rarely about the substance.

[Mikam73]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_WfQoKRlxE

[gklinger]

That's pretty neat, Mikam73. I don't think it is from 1982 as the title suggests though because that looks an awful lot like a 64c to me.

[orion70]

I started word processing on my C64 with Speedscript and later GEOS with an MPS 802 printer;

Reviving an old thread, because I recently had a lot of fun learning to use SpeedScript 3.0 for VIC.

For anyone interested in early freeware word processing , I found three Compute!'s Gazette articles, cleaned and packed in pdf files:

General introduction to SpeedScript for VIC and Commodore 64;

Speedscript Revisited (SpeedScript 3.0);

and SpeedScript Customizer.

[Wonder-Boy]

Thanks. I like speedscript because it is the only word processor (for the C64) from which I can convert the files to .txt files for the PC.