alt Hacker NewsWordStar originally didn’t have a spell checker. It was an add in product. And even after SpellStar was integrated (a response to the NewStar clone’s built-in spell checker), it was never as-you-type spell checking, which is what we got in Word 97, and what consumed the cycles on a 486.
Word 97 also had as-you-type grammar checking, which wordstar never had. Wordstar did have an add in extra cost grammar checker whose name escapes me at the moment. But again, it was never real time.
Yes, programs have become bloated, but it is worth it to compare apples to apples.
One might argue that real time isn’t necessary, and one might be right. But that’s different from poorly written.
Replies
TheAmazingRace • today at 6:23 PM
Apples to apples? More like Windows to Windows. LOL
Fair points. I'd argue that realtime spellcheck doesn't provide a lot of value -- when you're writing you want to focus on the writing and go back and fix the spelling when you do the editing.
I'd argue it was a combination of "now we have more processing power lets see how we can use it up" and "we don't have to make so many hard design and programming decisions thanks to the extra power", with the result being that you "had" to get the new chips in order to run the new software that was replacing the old software
Repeat that a number of cycles and we wound up with Windows Vista ;)
Since we're discussing word processors, I would say that WordPerfect5 for DOS was the best word processor I've used to date (Pages on Mac comes in second). It did almost everything that Word does today in terms of word processing (not page layout but Word is terrible at that anyway, you really need InDesign to do that properly), was fast and easy to work with (keyboard shortcuts for operations is much faster than a mouse/GUI), and didn't require nearly as much processing power.