Microsoft Revisits the '80s With MS-DOS, Word for Windows Source Code,

users
#1

The first floppies where 8", single sided, single density and were lade for punch card substitute: the 80kB capacity was then equivalent to a rack of 1000 80 columns punched cards. That was in the early 1970's. Before that, there was 14" amovible HDD, with a capacity of 2.5 MB, made by several manufacturer, IBM, CDC...
The DRI CP/M80 then CP/M86 were nothing but vaporware, only the MP/M86 (multitasking variant of CP/M86) never had a real existence. When Microsoft bought DRI, they were only able to add some bugs to a perfectly healthy OS. Sadly, they were a lot better in marketing, and they took over the market.  You know the rest of the story :frowning:
Best regards,

Jean-Louis Oneto

Envoyé depuis un mobile Samsung

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#2

The
DRI CP/M80 then CP/M86 were nothing but vaporware,

I think you must have CP/M and CP/M-86 conflated with something
else. CP/M-80 was anything *but* "vapourware." In the mid-70's to
early 80's, 8080- and Z-80 systems ran on nothing *but* CP/M. Oh,
there were a few other also-rans, but they didn't amount to much.
Micropolis, for example, had its own OS (MDOS), for example. I ran
both CP/M-80 1.4, CP/M 2.2 and CP/M Plus (aka: CP/M 3) operating
systems, and, in fact, wrote quite a good deal of code for CP/M-80
systems, including contributing to the original XMODEM and MINICBBS
projects.

I ran one of the first, if not *the* first, 24x7 RCP/M systems in the
state of Michigan.

Nor was CP/M-86 vapourware. It was short-lived, because Kildall was
way too late to the game, but it did exist. IIRC, the DEC Rainbow
dual-booted CP/M-86 and DOS?

only the MP/M86
(multitasking variant of CP/M86) never had a real existence.

I think I ever only saw a single MP/M system in the wild.

When
Microsoft bought DRI,

[snip]

Microsoft never bought Digital Research International. (Looking...)
It was acquired by Novell in 1981.

Regards,
Jim

#3

Jean-Louis Oneto wrote:

When Microsoft bought DRI

Microsoft didn't buy DRI. They bought Q-DOS from Seattle Computer
Products. Gary Kildall, creator of CP/M later took MS to court and
proved that MS-DOS contained directly copied CP/M code.

#4

Jim Seymour wrote:

Nor was CP/M-86 vapourware. It was short-lived, because Kildall was
way too late to the game, but it did exist. IIRC, the DEC Rainbow
dual-booted CP/M-86 and DOS?

CP/M-86 was also one of the 3 operating systems that were initially
available with the IBM PC. The third was called (IIRC) pCode or
something like that.

#5

"James Knott":

Gary Kildall, creator of CP/M later took MS to court and

proved that MS-DOS contained directly copied CP/M code.

Gary Kildall was a kind of man who believed that you can write something once and get dividends from it indefinitely.
That didn't work well.

#6

I've discovered another neat reason to use character styles instead of direct character formatting. We've already discussed the advantage of changing character formatting document-wide by just changing the style.

I've always used Ctrl-B for boldface and Ctrl-I for Italics in providing direct character formatting to my text. I didn't want to be bothered by character styles. But, on occasion, I want to clean up a document by removing direct paragraph formatting (Ctrl-M). When I do that, it clears *all* direct formatting, whether paragraph or character, so I end up losing all my bold and italics.

But, I've now learned to use the character styles Emphasis for Italics and Strong Emphasis for boldface instead of the direct bold and Italics commands. Then when I hit Ctrl-M to clean up formatting, then my boldface and Italics are preserved, because they are controlled by character styles rather than direct formatting.

This has been a major change in the way I've worked over the years, but I think as I get used to it, I'll really like it and the greater control I'll get over my work.

What's interesting is that this is the way LaTeX editors like LyX work by default. It's second nature in LyX, because that's the *only* way it works. But because of LO's open model (a billion ways of accomplishing the same task), I've had to adjust how I work with the office suite.

Virgil

#7

Interesting point, Virgil. I think we need to weak a fine line between
providing a tool that we can use intelligently, and forcing people to
do something they don't understand. Using styles the right way is
something you have to be educated about. Like you, I started by
getting the idea that I could change styles throughout the document if
I used them consistently. But it took longer for me to really
appreciate the need to do functional style definitions. Any character
can be bold for a variety of reasons, and the key is to create and use
styles based on the function of that element in a document. That way,
you can change a subset of all of the bold characters without changing
others. But that requires starting to really think about the
architecture of your information.

Regards,

#8

Hi :slight_smile:
Nice! :slight_smile: I wonder if you can reconfigure the
Ctrl B
combo to apply the relevant style instead of just making it bold
temporarily?
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#9

Yes, you can, but I found you don't want to.

In the Tools/Customize dialogs, you can assign any style to a keystroke combination. I tried it by reassigning Ctrl-B to the Strong Emphasis character style and Ctrl-I to the Emphasis style. But, unlike the direct formatting commands, these don't *toggle* the attribute. So, if while typing, I hit Ctrl-B, then everything after it applies the Strong Emphasis character style. If I hit Ctrl-B again, it *doesn't* turn it off. So, I reassigned those keystrokes to their toggled effects.

Instead, I assigned Alt-B and Alt-I to the respective character styles. Then, I assigned Alt-D to the "Default" character style. Now, I can apply the desired style quickly while typing without altering the default behavior of the program for those times when I might need it.

Virgil

#10

Hi :slight_smile:
I think you have gone into quite advanced usages of styles. To start with
i kept it extremely simple and mixed in some direct formatting too.

It took a while to get used to direct formatting too but that was so long
ago now that it's difficult to remember. Most of my colleagues don't know
key-combos such as Ctrl B. They reach for the mouse.

Even so people sometimes don't realise those are toggle-switches and tend
to select an area of text and 'have' to be taught that they don't need to.
[Grrr, taught bad habits iow]

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#11

Good points, Kevin. I'm learning that using styles takes a lot of thought and planning. I like the way I can customize LO to make it do amazing things. But, it can't be done thoughtlessly, or you'll end up redoing stuff later on.

It occurs to me that, when we create style definitions, what we're really doing is making LO work more like LyX. The difference is that, with LyX, somebody else has already created really good styles (called "environments") thus shielding the user from the need to create them. Problem is, when the pre-created environments don't meet your needs, you have a steep learning curve to try to change them. With LO, you can much more easily create and modify styles, but, if you want really good output, you *have* to create and modify your styles, and that takes thoughtful planning. For a person just wanting to get his project done, the need to create and customize the styles seems to get in the way. It's as if each user is actually "finishing" LO by making it work the way s/he prefers. In creating my LO styles, I've tried to use LyX environments as a model, mimicking their output, and tweaking where I find it helpful.

Virgil

#12

Hi :slight_smile:
Neat. I was wondering what work-around you would find.

The only one i thought of was to try to remember that i would have to
select an area of text to make bold instead of doing the toggling method.
I think your way is better though.
Thanks and regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#13

I always wrestle between formatting-as-I-type and formatting-after-I-type. I think the latter method is preferred as it separates content from presentation. The writer can concentrate solely on the substance of his work and it can be formatted later. That said, I find it difficult to go back through a 30 page document and find all of the instances of something that needs to be italicized, especially with small terms, such as "etc.", "e.g.", "i.e.", and so on. Invariably, when I try to format after my document is written, I miss something that should be formatted a special way, such as a block quote, or emphasized text. So, in practice, I tend to format as I go, and using keyboard shortcuts speeds things immensely. I've reconfigured several of the Ctrl-Key combinations to apply some of my most used paragraph styles. I'll do just about anything to keep my fingers on the home row instead of grabbing for the mouse or touchpad. Even when selecting text, I'll use the Shift-arrow keys rather than the mouse. I find it gives more precise control.

Virgil

#14

I won't necessarily disagree with you, but I tend to think that I'm only using LO the way it the designers intended. The character styles I'm using (Emphasis, Strong Emphasis) came with the program by default. So, some LO programmer, somewhere, anticipated that they would be used in place of Ctrl-I and Ctrl-B direct formatting.

If it is "advanced" it is only because we have become so entrenched in using word processors like digital typewriters that we've become old dogs trying to learn "new" tricks.

Virgil

#15

Hi :slight_smile:
I think it's great that LibreOffice allows both systems to be used within a
single document. I rarely need to completely change the entire look of any
documents so direct formatting works well for me.

I think this is one of those things that you can make as simple or as
complex as you like. Just because a choice exists doesn't mean you have to
use it.

So, my use of style is very minimal but is a HUGE help that saves me often
hours hours of work every time i have to import anything from certain
colleagues.

The only time i collaborate with others is when they give me documents for
a quarterly newsletter and once i've reformatted their work i tend to never
need to reformat it or make any changes at all. So the only style that
really matters to me is the "body text" one, or the "default" one. The
various headings help a little bit. So although styles can be far more
complicated and allow much flexibility all of that is beyond my
requirements. Even if i did need the more advanced stuff the biggest
saving in time was with the initial "paste as unformatted text" and finding
the text already in the format i wanted.

I am glad the more complicated stuff is there so that if i ever had more
advanced requirements i could upscale quite easily.

However i think "scaring people off" by pointing out how complicated it all
could be might make them miss out on the huge benefits they could get from
the very simple bits of it.

Oooops! sorry for ranting! I know it's not the way you meant it! Happy
Easter all! :)))
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#16

The problem with mixing direct formatting and styles is that you
usually discover you should have used styles after the document is
done and you need to make changes. Our ability to foresee the future
is often very limited.I often get asked by someone how to fix
something in a long (e.g. 600 page) document without having to crawl
through the entire document page by page. My answer is that I can help
you not have this problem in the future, but for now it is going to be
tricky if not impossible.

Regards,

#17

Hi :slight_smile:
+1
That is true. However i rarely need to do more than correct tpyos or
sepling mistooks or maybe reword something. Luckily i don't have to
collaborate with other people much either (apart from them sending me
hideously malformed MS documents and me pasting their article into 'my' Odt
newsletter).

I suspect a lot of people are in a similar position to me but of course a
lot are in a similar position to you and also a lot similar to Virgil too.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: