On Sat, 14 Jun 1997, Sam Ismail wrote:
> I've been meaning to ask this: Why the hell is that program called
> "Scripsit"? I can't think of a stupider name.
Damfino. It was the official name of every word processing program ever
written in Fort Worth. I started with the cassette version on the Mod 1
with 16k (left 4017 bytes for text once the program was loaded) and never
touched a typewriter after, except to help a friend lift an old Selectric
over the edge of a Dumpster(tm). Scripsit for the Model 2 in my arrogant
opinion was the best writer's word processor ever run on a Z-80. Isaac
Asimov did his last 150-200 books using it -- none of that fancy crap
about proportional print, kerning or multiple fonts -- what a writer
needed was 10-pitch, ragged margins, double-spaced and a clean printout
for the editor which the Daisy Wheel Printer II was far better at than any
of these new-fangled laser things for producing. Scripsit-16 was even
better in some ways, but writers didn't want to learn Xenix. (That
program was unique in that it was the first serious application ported
from Unix to MS-DOS instead of the other way around like Wordperfect and
Samna). I'll admit for my own _use_ rather than _support, my favorite was
AllWrite by ProSoft, which I used for years on my old 4p. But Scripsit
was (in _ALL_ of its incarnations -- it was a different product from the
core on the 1/3/4 line, 2/12, 16/6000 Xenix then MS-DOS, and Color
Computer -- same name, different product on four architectures --
SuperScripsit being a very different [and faulty] can of worms) Radio
Shack's only name for its home-brewed word processing programs. The word
itself is a tense of "to write" in Latin. Do a web search (_ANY_ engine
-- I've checked) and most of the hits you'll get on the keyword "scripsit"
are documents in that language or by SCA members. The rest are mostly
trivia, but one was a good article on classic computers and software by a
New Mexico stringer for the New York Times, URL not presently at hand.
If anybody's got a copy of AllWrite or Scripsit-PC (I want to check them
out with the sundry emulators under Linux -- AllWrite should be fun
running in a TRS-DOS emulator running in an MS-DOS emulator) I'm really
looking for them. My AllWrite disappeared in a move, and I never thought
to acquire Scripsit-PC (I never expected to have a system that was PC
compatible, in honest truth -- but then Linux appeared, with _source
code_). Oh, and if anyone has a copy of "The Source" to LS-DOS that can
be spared (I _knew_ I should have bought it when Roy was closing it out!)
I'm looking for that too.
--
Ward Griffiths
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within
the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." --Claire Wolfe
Received on Sat Jun 14 1997 - 22:27:42 BST