Go back to the late 70s and we have WordStar on CP/M. (1978) Very capable for the time. First of the “WYSIWYG” style word processors that I’m aware of.
Possibly a year or so later there was AppleWorks - ran well on a 64KB Apple //e and really well on a 128KB system. Let not forget the databases we had back then too. Wordwise on the BBC Micro and many others on the old 8-bit systems.
Bigger systems (minis) tended to have text formatting packages. Various incarnations of ROFF on Unix systems and similar on other systems. I even wrote my own very simple one at uni. in 1980 as I really didn’t want to hand-write my essays…
The challenge back then was spell checking, but that’s another tale for another day…
On the Pico2? We have 500Kb of RAM, infinite EEPROM and SD storage (relatively speaking). More power than the 6-user Unix PDP11/40 with 128KB of core I used at Uni… which supported compiling C, Pascal, text formatting, databases and who knows what else. (And of-course we have that now in the form of Fuzix)
Of-course expectations were lower then. We had ‘ed’ (or ‘em’ - Editor for Mortals) back then, but screen based programs were starting to be a thing.
Hi, thanks for your efforts in developing Picoware. I have a picocalc - with updated STM firmware - and a pico 2w installed. I tried to install v1.8.3 but the screen turns black. So I am back on v1.8.2.
@Drogon Well, i didnt know wll that, me being born in the 80s and all. So all we need is someone who would give enough shyte to translate a word processor for the picocalc, right? i think ill move to zero 2w soon. less hassle with programming something i dont understand.
I used the one from your GitHub so I assume it is the 1.4 version. Is there a way to check that on the picocalc? I flashed the firmware two weeks ago using a laptop that is not around at the moment…
I checked and I installed v1.4! I had uf2loader installed and as I updated Picoware when it said there was an update and that failed I “nuked” the pico. Then manually installed v1.8.3 and still black screen. I then reverted back to 1.8.2. That one is working fine. Tried again upgrading to v1.8.3 and failed again.
Have v1.8.3 working now. Don’t understand what happened. The only things I did different was:
Got into boot mode using menu in v1.8.2
Downloaded v1.8.3 again - on same PC. Without renaming the file - in the previous attempt I moved the file to different folder and removed (1) in the filename because of another copy already there - installed the uf2.
Don’t know why the first Picoware upgrade to v1.8.3 failed.
This is actually less capable on machines such as the Osborne and the PicoCalc. But, as asked, I won’t go into detail so as to avoid talking about non-PicoWare stuff. Just know that WordStar (and anything that does WYSIWYG) is not something you’d want to use on a PicoCalc, for reasons similar to those of certain pre-1982 systems.
No, you’re talking about stuff that didn’t happen until more than five years later: probably about two generations into the future at that point. (The Apple IIe was released in 1983 and AppleWorks in 1984.)
Aye, I’m a few years ahead of myself here. I started on Apple IIs in '78 then it all got a bit confusing. My university years (1980-86/87) were a somewhat challenging time for me, personally.
The thing I see letting the PicoCalc down is nothing more than the display. The MCU is more than capable of running a multi-user, multi-tasking OS, as were minis (16 and 32-bit) of that era. I believe we have bigger expectations in these modern days though.
I used to be able to hold down the F1 key while booting the picocalc and bring up programs on the micro SD card. I am running a pico2w. After upgrading to 1.8.2 it doesn’t work. Is there something I need to do to get this back or just use the file manager?
I tried to upgrade to 1.8.3 using the firmware update under system and it won’t install. Am I missing something?
