Re: dirty little secrets

[nsivin@xxxxxxxx (Nathan Sivin)]

OKAnnie:

Let me follow your splendid example with a COUPLE of dirty little
secrets. I observed long ago that the relentless urge to upgrade
generally drives applications well beyond the point of maturity,
so they get more & more complicated while not doing much more. I
caught the crest with PC-FILE, and still use a couple of versions
of it, III
(1988) if I want ASCII records and + for DB3-compatible files.
It is small enough that it is extremely responsive, and is much
quicker at organizing reports than the bloated concoctions that
most people buy because everyone else buys them.

I also use QUATTRO PRO 1 for DOS, which was the last version of
that program to show more than incremental improvement, unless
you care about gooeys. It also loads instantaneously and does
everything I want a spreadsheet to do, from mathematical
astronomy to a ledger.

Finally, alongside XYDOS for English and WPW 6.1 when I need
Chinese input or manipulated graphics, I still use PC-WRITE 3.04,
for two reasons. One is instant loading and writing with hard
EOL'S, which makes it the ideal tool for writing e-mail--I write
and upload rather than writing IN e-mail. The second is ED.DIR,
an indispensable feature that no other word processor has. It
records a directory, which you can then annotate, make into a
help file, etc. Each time you call it up, it updates the
information, shows new and deleted files, etc. All of this is
done at once, so you have as simple or elaborate a record you
want of all the files on your disk, directory by directory. I
have tried all sorts of utilities that try to do the same thing,
but none of them with ASCII output do it as simply.

-- Nathan Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-3325