75
votes
Why did fonts in Windows 1.01's Write application look so poor?
Your images appear to have been generated via emulation, with heavy anti-aliasing that doesn't show what it looked like in reality.
Here's Windows 3.1 Write in native VGA resolution without any image ...
- 6,615
53
votes
Accepted
History behind the text column restriction
Old COBOL standards were based around 80-column punched cards, and columns beyond 71 (or 72) were reserved for line numbers. They were little used, but a numbered deck, if dropped, could be sorted by ...
- 2,809
45
votes
Why did fonts in Windows 1.01's Write application look so poor?
Because those were low-resolution bitmap fonts.
In Windows 1.01, most fonts were monochrome bitmap fonts, and not particularly high-resolution at that. (There were CONTINUOUSSCALING ‘plotter’ fonts ...
- 21k
31
votes
Is there any text to speech program that will run on an 8- or 16-bit CPU?
Superior Software's "Speech" was a pure software speech synthesizer that ran on the BBC Micro (which used a 2MHz 6502A processor, so had slightly more raw processing power than typical 8-bit ...
- 2,307
30
votes
Accepted
Why did the original Apple //e have two sets of inverse video characters?
Why did the original Apple //e have two sets of inverse uppercase characters?
Simple: To allow lower case inverse letters.
It's all about the clever way Woz arranged the original II's single ...
- 208k
28
votes
Accepted
Proportional fonts on 8-bit computers
Digital Research produced as one of their early attempts into graphical desktops (on their way to GEM) a basic portable graphics library - GSX. GSX did actually support proportional fonts, both in ...
- 32.4k
25
votes
Executable ASCII files before x86?
If you go back a lot before the x86, this technique wasn't unusual at all. In fact, writing programs using printable letters and symbols was pretty much the norm for early computers, except that there ...
- 25.6k
24
votes
Is there any text to speech program that will run on an 8- or 16-bit CPU?
First, there is a major caveat. Most of the iconic early voice synthesizers were not purely software systems. For example, the classic DECTalk system, famously the voice of the late Stephen Hawking, ...
- 13.4k
22
votes
Accepted
Besides the VIC-20 did any other micros have fewer than 32 columns available for text mode?
The BASIC Programming cartridge for the Atari 2600 displayed twelve characters per line.
The RCA 1802-based VIP used bitmap graphics rather than having a "text mode" as such, but the typical ...
- 34k
22
votes
Accepted
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
There were many editors available for DOS, both standalone and included in development environments. I suspect that most developers using IDEs used their IDE’s built-in editor; those were perhaps the ...
- 117k
22
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
WordStar was one of the earliest and most popular word processing programs for CP/M and MS-DOS. One of the key features for a lot of people was the non-document mode. This did a few important things:
...
21
votes
Accepted
Why are the | and ¦ keys labelled the wrong way around?
ASCII was designed from the start with usable subsets (for instance an uppercase subset representable with six bits, consisting of the four central columns) and international variants. SHARE (IBM ...
- 481
21
votes
Is there any text to speech program that will run on an 8- or 16-bit CPU?
There existed a Russian text-to-speech program written for the Elektronika BK-0010 in the early 1980s, whose length was 023500 bytes == 10048, mentioned in a list of application programs for the BK-...
- 18.1k
20
votes
What's the origin of terminating strings by setting the high bit of the last character?
Commodore BASIC 2.0 (originally from Microsoft), used in the VIC-20 and Commodore 64, stored its table of BASIC tokens this way too. Instead of true ASCII, these machines used PETSCII, where lower-...
- 2,038
20
votes
Accepted
What's the origin of terminating strings by setting the high bit of the last character?
The method was pretty common for small systems that had to do case-insensitive comparisons to user input or, simply, storage, of a lot of short strings (a standard case in BASIC interpreters).
...
- 32.4k
17
votes
Accepted
What are the rules for Applesoft BASIC formatting for code?
This is an AppleSoft issue where it puts spaces either side of a token.
PET/CBM BASIC (based off the same code base) doesn't do this.
Tokenising ignores spaces, this means it can be difficult on the ...
- 5,277
17
votes
History behind the text column restriction
On the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words, I include my scan of a punched card:
As amply described in the other answers, it shows how the columns are visibly marked on the card for ...
- 5,567
17
votes
Proportional fonts on 8-bit computers
Just the first (of many) example of using proportional fonts on Commodore64: https://youtu.be/k2NRlsopoOU?t=441
You couldn't really use a proportional font on the Spectrum because
the colour ...
- 9,850
17
votes
History behind the text column restriction
In the old days, I remember we were told to never go beyond the 70'th column in the text editor (the actual value was usually something above 70, but less than 80). [...] If it makes a difference, ...
- 208k
17
votes
Accepted
Which are the earliest real-time text editors?
I think the following early text editors meet your criteria:
Brian Tolliver’s TVEdit (Stanford, 1965), based on Doug Engelbart’s earlier word processor; see On-line Text Editing: a Survey:
TVEDIT ...
- 117k
17
votes
Is there any text to speech program that will run on an 8- or 16-bit CPU?
Is the 68000 a 16-bit CPU? :) To some it is, and therefore Say, from 1985, for the Commodore Amiga counts. It can be found on the Workbench disk. For more reading, look up the narrator.device ...
- 11.3k
16
votes
What's the origin of terminating strings by setting the high bit of the last character?
WordStar
As noted here, WordStar set the 8th bit of the last character of each word. This was a key difference between Document mode and Non-Document mode. Non-Document mode also did not automatically ...
15
votes
Is there any text to speech program that will run on an 8- or 16-bit CPU?
see:
CZ+SK ZX SW archive
In there are TTS engines for ZX Spectrum (1bit digital sound, no DAC, no FPU, no mul/div instructions, ~3.5 MHz 8bit Z80 CPU):
Kecal 1.0
very simple asm, (portable to C/C++...
- 7,152
15
votes
What were the most popular text editors for MS-DOS in the 1980s?
My favorite editor as a professional programmer in the DOS enthronement was E. The OP is mistaken in saying that E was not available until the 90s. True, it was not included with PC DOS until 1993, ...
- 8,569
14
votes
Proportional fonts on 8-bit computers
Back in 1986, a company called Berkeley Softworks released a GUI desktop environment called GEOS for the Commodore 64. It was later ported to the Commodore 128, the Commodore Plus/4, and Apple II.
...
- 2,002
14
votes
Accepted
How was text handled on the Amstrad CPC 464?
All text is painted as bitmaps.
The highest-resolution built-in mode is 640x200 pixels, so that provides an 80x25 text mode. 80-column modes were used in business software (e.g. DBase II) and even in ...
- 35.6k
14
votes
Accepted
Were any decimal-based computers capable of handling text?
Really early computers like the Mark I and ENIAC didn't have enough memory to attempt to handle text; also the use-case was mostly calculations.
A number of decimal IBM computers used characters (with ...
- 25.6k
13
votes
What's the origin of terminating strings by setting the high bit of the last character?
This practice became widespread with small 8bit systems, which had a very limited ROM space. It has some advantages:
It saves one byte per string.
Easy detection of string end, just with "AND ...
- 5,427
13
votes
Why did fonts in Windows 1.01's Write application look so poor?
It isn't. The examples are comparing apples and oranges. As they cover three different situations/usages:
Bitmap Emulation vs. Native Usage vs. Character Emulation
The results are based on what ...
- 208k
12
votes
Executable ASCII files before x86?
It was standard practice on the Sinclair ZX80 & ZX81 to put executable code into a REM statement at the beginning of a BASIC program.
REM statements are, of course, text comments, so this meets ...
- 7,963
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible