Hi Ralf, good to focus on the “whys”.
You said: | “Nor would I do any graphics work in DOS, or any word | processing these days.” I did get into DOS because of “word processing”. More precisely it is a text-processing tool(!) EVA.EXE which was developed by Primož Jakopin in the 1970ies and 80ies, ported to TOS on Atari, in the 1990ies to DOS and WINDOWS. I re-discovered it last year on his site and also got in good contact with him. He still is working on it... I am especially interested in how the MOUSE is used in this particular program. 1.) The cursor can be “bound” to the mouse pointer. Move around in your text without the need to click your cursor into the text, which makes literally thousands of clicks obsolete. (Ergonomy) 2.) The mouse buttons can be assigned (in the Windows version) with whatever function you want. In the DOS version, it is assigned to LEFT=Delete RIGHT=Insert which make sense in this editor. I was researching the net and looking at many editors but never found this feature anywhere else. But in FreeDOS: Amazingly, the mouse in VDE Editor for DOS behaves the same way (without assigning commands to the mouse buttons, however. - This can be achieved using Bret Johson’s excellent “MOUSKEYS”) This singular feature makes me cope with the downsides of DOS but I have more reasons to use DOS. (I did already mention them in earlier Emails.) Moreover, I am a German native and Primož Jakopin is from Slovenia. Especially the letter was a challenge in the past (ASCII code page) to get all diacritics right. This has changed since, using UTF-8, which has appeared in DOS via MinEd, Blocek ed. al. And when it comes to “retro-computing”, it’s not all about hardware only. Still an excellent tool I consider TROFF, now GROFF, for Unix/Linux -which also exists for Windows, appeared in 1990 (Version 0.3.1) by James Clark) coming from “a text-formatting program called RUNOFF, which was written by Jerome H. Saltzer for MIT's CTSS operating system in the mid-1960s! If one focuses on text-processing, editing or “word processing” and looking at the development there is really little progress even possible. I use the MARKDOWN syntax in FreeDOS which is very cool and can easily later be used for websites or printing when exported. I am still wondering if there might be a comparable product like the “Raspberry” but for an architecture that allows for FreeDOS natively? Regards, Thomas _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
