copy, a backup file—meaning that you’re probably still in business if a
glitch destroys the original. Uncle Seymour makes you think twice,
literally, before you erase whole files.
The old saw of the computer trade, however, will always apply, no matter
what the program:
“Garbage in, garbage out”—“GIGO.”
Berenice Hoffman, my literary agent, really rubbed that in. I’m the type
whose letters and checks take a little time to adjust to a new year.
“For your records, if you keep carbons,” Berenice replied to one note,
“you might want to change the date to 1983—didn’t the computer tell
you?” The best programs in the world can’t detect such mistakes.
But wait; I just remembered. The fancier computers have electronic
clocks that potentially could warn you if the wrong date appeared when
you were working with a correspondence format.
AFTER-THE-GOOF FEEDBACK
WordStar also provides another service—offering error messages telling
you what _went_ wrong. It isn’t perfect. Sometimes you may see
combinations of letters and numbers, meaningless to someone without a
manual. But normally WordStar is helpful. Say you want to use two
markers—one at the start and one at the end—to designate material to be
moved to another part of the document. WordStar will tell you if you
forget to type out either one.
Ideally, programs not only will offer you a diagnosis after the goof but
also a solution. Although WordStar isn’t as advanced as some programs in
this respect, it’s very adequate for the experienced user.
ABILITY TO CUSTOMIZE
I adapted my WordStar to the requirements of a writer. Editors normally
don’t like hyphenated copy, so now WordStar’s “hyphen help,” which
suggests possible hyphen breaks, is an optional feature instead of a
normal one. No longer need I turn it off with special commands. WordStar
provides a menu in the installation program that makes it easy for you
to change normal =defaults=—the settings that your software will have
before you tinker with it. The menu doesn’t cover every possibility. But
you can vary margins and many other important details, and once you’re
experienced, you can do a =patch=—a modification in the program—to
change other things.
If you’re a novice buying from a full-service computer store, ask it to
set up your WordStar. Better still, try to dope it out yourself so you
make your own changes in the future. You might get guidance from a
users’ group.
Likewise, you might tinker with a communications program to make it work
better with the computers you plan to use and talk to. Or you might set
up a record-keeping program to check automatically the accuracy of
information fed into it.
ACCESSORY PROGRAMS
WordStar will work with a variety of accessory programs intended
especially for it—everything ranging from electronic thesauruses to
spelling checkers, word counters, footnoters, and a communications
program.
Some word processors, accounting packages, other software, include all
the functions you’d need. Others require you to buy the accessory
programs. That’s not always bad. Why bother to pay for a dictionary if
you’re a perfect speller? Just make sure—before you buy—that the
original software either includes good accessory programs or will work
with them.
Some outside companies’ accessory programs, by the way, may be superior
to those from the main software’s manufacturer.
SUPPORT FROM THE MANUFACTURER
There is one plus that I wish I could have included in my praise of
WordStar—good support from the manufacturer. Don’t count on it. In the
area of guidance and troubleshooting from the manufacturer, WordStar on
occasion hasn’t even been adequate.
Calling as a prospective customer, I couldn’t find out if WordStar in a
Xerox 820 format would run smoothly on my Kaypro. The company took down
my message, then mailed me literature that didn’t answer my question.
A California man phoned MicroPro with a problem involving DataStar, a
sister program of WordStar that eases record keeping. “We do not have
time to correct the programming that results in this quirk,” he heard.
He complained to _InfoWorld_ that MicroPro “has some really elegant
program tools but no inkling as to the meaning of customer support.”
Likewise, the head of a MicroPro users group in New York told the
magazine that “fully half of the people who called me to join
immediately presented me with a problem they were having.”
For a while—I don’t know what it’ll be like when you’re reading this
book—MicroPro wasn’t even replying to most customers’ questions on the
phone; this supposedly was the dealers’ job. And while Rubinstein’s
company indeed sells a Mercedes of a program, some computer stores
aren’t up to fixing the windshield wipers.
Ideally, software manufacturers like MicroPro will not only offer
technical support but also 800 numbers so you won’t be on hold for
twenty minutes, racking up a formidable long-distance bill.
BACKUP IV ❑ On the Evolution of Software (And a “Perfecter and
Perfecter” Program)
Mary Matthews, a gifted writer-editor in Chevy Chase, Maryland, favors a
WordStar rival called Perfect Writer.
“What a conceited program,” I say.
“WordStar’s a dinosaur,” she shoots back.
In late 1984 we both tried new versions of our pet software (actually
WordStar 2000 is more of a successor), and while defending them, we
harbor reservations.
First the basics. I myself prefer a program like WordStar Version 3.3,
which is in the “get-what-you-see” tradition and shows your copy on
screen almost exactly as it will be printed. But Mary makes a good
argument for a rival with a different philosophy. WordStar 2000 in fact
helps her case. It now has many of the features that her dear Perfect
Writer came out with first, including split screens. Interestingly,
however, the new Perfect is more useful to the “get-what-you-see” crowd
than is the older version, while WordStar 2000 is _less_ get what you
see in an important way than 3.3 is. At least that’s true of the
WordStar 2000 previewed to dealers. During a demo, anyhow, a MicroPro
employee couldn’t coax 2000 into displaying double-spacing conveniently
on screen even though we could have double-spaced on paper.
Where does the increasing resemblance between Perfect Writer and the
WordStar family fit in the cosmic scheme? I’ll recklessly generalize:
The word processors of the world are becoming like refrigerators; all
the deluxe models will have the equivalents of automatic defrosters and
ice makers and butter warmers and lettuce crispers. More of the new
wrinkles will be marginal. And the surviving companies will be the ones
that can explain and exploit the differences and support their customers
the best.
Not everyone likes butter warmers. As noted before, WordStar 2000 isn’t
an unalloyed improvement for me, and the “perfecter” Perfect in some
ways disappoints Mary.
The older WordStar lets you move to the left of a line with the
combination of the Control key and the letters Q and S or =Control-QS=.
A touch typist could do this almost instantly. WordStar 2000, on the
other hand, uses =Control-CL=. =CL= stands for “cursor left,” =CR= for
“cursor right,” and mnemonic commands like those are indeed easier to
keep in your head, especially if you use a program only occasionally. On
the other hand, the new strokes are harder for a touch typist—this one,
anyway. Likewise, Mary wishes that Perfect Writer’s new commands were a
bit more logical, especially to old Perfect Writer hands.
Concluding, Mary says Perfect Writer users with 64K machines shouldn’t
junk them to buy more powerful computers just to run the new version. My
thinking is basically the same about WordStar 2000 versus WordStar 3.3.
The older program isn’t as good as 2000 in some cases; for instance,
when you could use built-in memo format to make temporary employees more
productive. But 3.3 is still terrific for people _without such needs_,
and I’ll think long and hard before I myself change.
Mary’s impressions and mine are typical of many veteran users of
software who can’t stomach features added for novices. She’s 100 percent
right except when we disagree. As “host,” I won’t rebut her in the
places below where we do.
Here’s what she sent over the phone via her Kaypro II:
Somehow, I’m not sure how, I’ve gotten to be enough of an authority on
Perfect Writer—the “old” Perfect Writer, that is, the one released in
June 1983—that strangers call me up and say that a computer salesman
somewhere told them I was the Sibyl who could answer their questions
with a local instead of a long-distance phone call. Luckily, the
questions usually run in the “How the heck do you do X?” vein, or I
might have to reveal that I’m only a good-hearted writer.
Now the Perfect Writer people have released a brand-new version of
their already powerful program, and I think I’m in trouble. The new,
revised version of Perfect incorporates some radical changes—sweeping
enough to demand 128K of RAM (and IBM PC DOS) to operate. (Actually,
after claiming that the new Perfect can edit documents of up to 100
pages, the manual states that “with 64K of RAM you will be able to
edit documents about 5 pages long,” so I assume that the new Perfect
takes up about 56K of RAM—not being familiar with the PC’s way of
juggling numbers, I can’t tell exactly.) I’m in trouble because I
won’t be the reigning Sibyl anymore unless I can figure out how to buy
a PC-compatible computer with a decent keyboard (most PC keyboards are
horrid) and still do things like pay bills and buy the occasional loaf
of bread and jug of wine.
The most radical of the changes is that the new Perfect Writer now
uses what it calls “pop-up command menus” during editing. When you hit
the Escape key, a small (about one-twelfth of the screen) “top menu”
will superimpose itself over your text, as close to your cursor as
possible, three characters away to the left or right. It lists your
choices for subsidiary menus, which eventually lead you to the command
you want.
Nearly every command has been changed, so that those of us who are
used to the old Perfect Writer must learn the editing commands all
over again. The new manual (haters of the old one will be glad to
learn that the index is now at the back where it belongs and those
frustrating Roman numerals are gone) explains with a straight face
that the pop-up menus exist so that you “don’t have to memorize
command sequences.” Of course, if you plan to use Perfect Writer more
than once a year or so, you’re going to memorize the commands, anyway;
and so, as the manual airily says, the Control key does everything the
Escape key does, identically; the only difference is that you “bypass”
the top menu—because, it says, you aren’t always going to want to see
it. Mind you, if you use the Control key, you’ll see every menu but
the top menu, anyway.
Is this enough reason to change all the commands but one—to bypass
_one_ menu?
To me, this is not an improvement over the old Perfect Writer—not
unless you actually _like_ added keystrokes. All the old two- and
three-keystroke commands are now three-keystroke commands at least,
and often four or five. This is progress? The new Perfect Writer has
indeed taken pity on us and assigned to the PC’s function keys twenty
frequently used commands, so that if, for example, you don’t feel like
keystroking =Escape-DS-Carriage-Return= to save your document and
continue working on it (=Control-X-Control-S= in the old PW), you can
keystroke =SHIFT-Function Key 9-Carriage Return=. Whoopee.
Let us not carp too much about what strikes me as suspiciously similar
to kludge, since the new Perfect Writer is as fast or faster than the
old Perfect Writer. We’re probably only talking about a few
microseconds, mind you, but it still seems to me that the execution of
Perfect’s new commands is usually close to instantaneous. This is a
thing to marvel at when you compare Perfect Writer to WordStar 3.3,
where unless you have a specially speeded-up version with specially
reassigned command keys and fingers with a lightning-fast touch, it
takes forever to execute certain commands (well, ten or twenty
seconds) and perceptible time (say, one or two seconds) even if you do
have the speed. But I still say the 50, 100, or 200 percent additional
keystrokes are a pain in the you know where. The program may be
faster, but the human being is now 50, 100, or 200 percent slower.
One improvement in particular is one to run through the streets
singing about: Perfect Formatter has been incorporated into Perfect
Printer in the main menu (inexplicably renamed “PSI”), and the two of
them together are approximately a million times faster than they used
to be. Thank you, Perfect Writer!
For a couple of years now, I have been using Perfect for the long,
complicated projects, like books, that demand powerful editing
capabilities and Perfect’s special strengths—such as split-screen
editing, automatic footnoting, automatic construction of a table of
contents, etc. For shorter things, like personal letters, I’ve been
using WordStar, for its what-you-see-is-what-you-get screen. The main
failing of the old Perfect was whether or not you were using the
document design capabilities, you had very little idea of what the
final product was going to look like. (The main failing of WordStar,
which as far as I’m concerned has been a dinosaur for several years
now, is that it can’t do half of what Perfect can—and it does it
slowly, too.)
Shout “hallelujah,” brothers and sisters! The new MS-DOS PW allows you
to choose between using its old “@@ commands” and having
what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Or you can mix the two of them (not that
I know why anyone would want to, since with the PC I’m using, you
can’t tell when a word’s been underlined).
You can now get on-screen justification if you want it; and if you
want to underline a sentence, you don’t have to worry about your
on-screen justification being thrown off 4 or 5 characters—you just
position the cursor in front of the material you want to underline, go
to the end of it, and tell the machine to underline it. The exact
command sequence for underlining a sentence is =Escape-T-B= (begin
marking), =Escape-F-S= (go to the end of the sentence), =Escape-A-M-U=
(underline the marked area). This looks like a lot of work, especially
compared with the old PW’s @@ux{}, until you stop and consider what
the same thing would be in WordStar. Suppose it’s a ten-word sentence
you want to underline: you’d go to the start of the sentence and
keystroke something like this: =Control-P-S=, =Control-F=,
=Control-F=, =Control-F=, =Control-F=, =Control-F=, =Control-F=,
=Backspace=, =Backspace=, =Control-P-S=.
I’ll break discipline and object to Mary’s description of the WordStar
underlining procedure. You could underline a sentence just by starting
with one =Control-P-S= and ending it with another. What’s the big
deal, Mary? Your described procedure would apply only to material that
you underlined _after_ you wrote it. All those =Control-F=s do is make
the cursor jump a word ahead. _Grrr!_ Then again, maybe I’m simply a
more decisive underliner. I _know_ what I want! If nothing else, this
little disagreement shows how work habits influence choices in word
processors.
Not only does the new Perfect Writer have the old Perfect’s
strengths—split-screen editing of up to seven documents at a time, a
zillion powerful editing commands, still another zillion powerful
document structuring options—but it’s added a few more just for fun.
For example:
◾ The old Perfect allowed you to delete from wherever the cursor is to
the end of whatever sentence you’re in; the new one lets you do
that, of course, and also lets you cut to the end of whatever
paragraph you’re in—or an entire paragraph, if you’re at its
beginning.
◾ Now you can delete not only the next word ahead of your cursor but
also the word behind it—a small thing but amazingly handy.
◾ You don’t have to delete text before you copy it. (However, the
process is more complicated than it used to be.)
◾ You can flush right material on screen—useful for the
what-you-see-is-what-you-get feature.
◾ You can more or less paginate on screen—although this instruction is
only good for the what-you-see-etc. editing; it’s useless for the
document-design mode (@@ commands).
◾ You can use the “Search” function to search not only the document
you’re working in now but any and all other document files on your
diskette. This strikes me as amazingly handy for editing multiple
documents when you can’t remember what the name of the other
document is or where the reference is you’re thinking of. For
example, suppose you’re writing to Joyce Davenport and you want to
add a paragraph from a letter you wrote to James T. Kirk but you
can’t remember more than that it was about artichokes. You would
invoke “search document”; the prompter then asks you what you’re
searching for, and you say, “Artichokes.” Pretty soon you have a
list of the documents the word “artichokes” appears in, and you can
then call up the one you want for multiple-document editing.
◾ Similar to this is something new the main menu offers: you can
compare two files, and Perfect Writer will show you their
differences—useful for comparing edited and unedited versions of a
report.
◾ If you have a color monitor, you can “paint” the letters and
backgrounds of the up-to-seven files you’re working on different
colors (eight background and sixteen letter colors), so as to tell
them apart. For me, this falls into the “who cares?” category, but
some may like it; and I have to admit, you can get some very pretty
(though not always easy on the eye) combinations.
◾ Perfect Writer now has the printing option “End at page X.” Shout
hallelujah, brothers and sisters!—the new Perfect at long last has
caught up with the dinosaurs like WordStar.
◾ Some of our old favorite document-design commands have been renamed,
usually for the better. And we have one absolutely dandy new
command: =@@need=. =@@need= makes sure that there’s enough room left
on the page for a chart or similar material. If you’ve just written
a 15-line poem that can’t be broken between pages, immediately after
the last line of your poem, type in =@@need{15 lines}=; if there
isn’t going to be enough room on the page, your poem will
automatically be “forced” to the following page. Hot diggety!
All is not completely rosy in Perfect land. The new Perfect has lost
some of the old Perfect’s advantages. For example, the old Perfect
had an automatic feature that told you where in your document you
were—35 percent of the way through, or whatever. Moreover, the old
Perfect had a command that let you know how long the document was in
terms of both number of lines and number of characters, and where
your cursor was in all this. I’ve searched the new Perfect manual
and haven’t been able to find any equivalent new command. The
closest I’ve been able to come is a command that lets you know only
how many characters there are in the file, not where you are, or
anything else; and the command isn’t listed in the index, nor is
there any equivalent command that I can find. Great work, guys. This
is what I call a major frustration. It’s maybe bad programming, and
it’s certainly bad documentation.
The new manual is slightly better organized than the old one, but
that’s not saying a lot. I’ve rarely been able to divine the new
name for the old command in the new manual, and when I’ve found it,
it’s usually been by accident. It would have been an enormous
service if the Perfect people had put in some sort of comparison
chart for us old-Perfect old pros.
Like the old Perfect, the new Perfect is very cavalier about the
number of spaces it leaves after a period or colon; sometimes it’s
the two you typed in, and sometimes it magically gets transformed
into one. The new Perfect goes the old Perfect three better and is
randomly cavalier about the number of spaces it leaves behind a
period, colon, quotation mark, question mark, and parenthesis—not
only deleting spaces where you do want them but also inserting them
where you don’t want them. Instead of mildly annoying, this quirk is
now big-league annoying. May whoever thought it up and liked it so
much he/she expanded it spend eternity brushing gnats out of his/her
face!
You still can’t tell the Search feature to search for something X
number of times. For example, if three times you use the word
“pishtosh” and want to change it to “nuts,” you can’t tell the
search-and-replace feature to “do this three times”—as with the old
Perfect, you have to do it twice with the “Ask me” and then “Cancel”
the third time and do it by hand, or do it three times and then have
Perfect search wastefully through the rest of the document for
something you know is not there.
The new Perfect’s printing menu is better than the one the old
Perfect came with but not nearly as good as the menu that David Hite
developed in 1983 for the old Perfect Writer. The only improvements
are the “compare” feature mentioned earlier and the ability to step
outside Perfect for a while into Perfect Calc, Perfect Filer, or a
telecommunications program—nothing I’d write home about.
We’ve lost the “one word” command—a serious blow for those of us who
used it to get around Perfect Writer’s cavalier treatment of periods
and colons. This command caused the characters placed within it to
be considered one word, so that Perfect Filer wouldn’t split certain
words between lines.
Perfect Speller, which is now on the same diskette with Perfect
Writer, Perfect Formatter, and Perfect Printer, is much faster than
it used to be. Alas, it is just as stupid. Unlike better spelling
checkers, Perfect Speller works on the system of prefixes, suffixes,
and roots. In other words, if the word “check” is an acceptable
root, then “checker” and “recheck” are acceptable. So are
“checkment” and “checkation.” And like the old Perfect Speller, the
new Perfect Speller doesn’t recognize its own vocabulary—it queried
words like “blankline” and “ux,” which are Perfect Writer commands
and ought rightly to be ignored. My recommendation is to get The
WORD Plus, which can be renamed to be accessed as if it were Perfect
Speller and which is far superior.
An interesting—I don’t say terrific—addition to the Perfect family
is Perfect Thesaurus. You substitute the Perfect Thesaurus diskette
for your document diskette in drive B, position the cursor on the
word you want to look up, type =Escape-S-T=, and Perfect Thesaurus
checks its dictionary. If the word is there, you may substitute any
of the synonyms for your original word, type in your own
replacement, or say “forget it” and go on to look for another
synonym. The hype says that Perfect Thesaurus “holds nearly 50,000
words (entries plus synonyms).”
The parenthetical remark is the key one to home in on. I asked
Perfect Thesaurus to look up “transform,” and it did; one of the
synonyms it offered was “metamorphose.” When I asked it to look up
“metamorphose,” it told me, “Word not found.” (Perfect Thesaurus has
also never heard of “fanatic,” “asinine,” “pop,” “airy,” “bypass,”
“instantaneous,” or “shrug,” among about fifteen others of the
forty-five words I tried.) I’d estimate that the average number of
synonyms offered for each word is between five and ten—if we
compromise and say seven, that’s only 6,000 or so words that Perfect
Thesaurus can recognize. Moreover, Perfect Thesaurus can only look
up fifteen words before it starts yelling, “No more marks,” and
refuses to cooperate any further.
In other words, Perfect Thesaurus is a nice toy, but I question its
usefulness for serious writers. Having a copy of _The Synonym
Finder_ by your desk offers you about a million words that you can
recognize, and is about as fast to use.
The new Perfect Writer itself still has many of the annoyances of
the old Perfect Writer:
◾ The automatic swapping feature still cuts in at inopportune
moments and makes you wait before you can continue typing or
execute a command. It’s now only one second or so instead of five
seconds or so, but it’s still annoying.
◾ There is still no automatic indicator showing where you are in
your document or how long it is, a feature of every other
word-processing program known to humankind.