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SuperText PROFESSIONAL (Word Processor)...


Faicuai

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No secret I've always been interested in productivity-stuff for Atari...

 

And sure enough, I stumbled with SuperText, while performing a search for MUSE software (games titles) on AtariMania... It turns out that there's nothing there... empty place holder with the info... (NOT even its rarity !)

 

Does anybody know anything about it? Does anyone have this title?

 

Thanks, in advance!

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Last Word is the last word in any 8-bit word processing system.  I tried WordStar on my Indus CP/M system.  Not impressed to say the least.

 

Last Word + SDX + 1MB system is killer.  In the next few weeks, I will finally get to run it via VBXE.

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10 hours ago, www.atarimania.com said:

Rarity would probably be a low "9". There's also a budget re-release by Main Street Publishing which is more common, rarity about "8" (?).

Very interesting...

 

I wonder how or why it is a low-9, instead of a lower value, or even higher one... (like 10, since it was not even in Atarimania, to begin with...)

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18 hours ago, flashjazzcat said:

Review here:

 

https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue61/313_2_REVIEWS_Super-Text.php

 

Not blown away by feature set.

 

I don't think anyone can get blown away by anything out there, especially after trying the Last Word...

 

FYI, LW is my de-facto tool for ALL editing work (including programming) on my SDX environment... I even call it with "-EDIT {filename}" special batch file, for which I turn off DMA with revised OS and watch that LW load pretty fast on stock CPU... ;-)

 

So it is not about the productivity value... but the historical value of SuperText Pro... ??

Edited by Faicuai
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13 minutes ago, Faicuai said:

I don't think anyone can get blown away by anything out there, especially after trying the Last Word...

Well, 'not blown away' was meant as a tactful understatement. There exist plenty of word processors written in the 1980s whose feature sets look extremely impressive on paper, and sometimes even in use as well. This does not appear to be one of those feature sets.

 

Aside from the (typical) narrow-mindedness when it came to integration with different disk operating systems, products like Paperclip and SuperScript are pretty damned powerful. TextPro (the real inspiration for TLW) even boasted full SpartaDOS subdirectory support, etc, but was less 'polished' and lacked the performance of a program like Paperclip.

 

I get the historical value, anyway, but as someone who gets excited when hearing about an Atari text editor I didn't already know about, I also get disappointed when I realise it's probably not going to motivate my competitive instincts. :)

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22 minutes ago, Faicuai said:

Very interesting...

 

I wonder how or why it is a low-9, instead of a lower value, or even higher one... (like 10, since it was not even in Atarimania, to begin with...)

 

Rarity isn't scientific, of course, it's based on our experience and perception. A "10" is for software where one or two copies - or no copy at all! - have been found in ten or fifteen years, for instance. Super-Text is very rare but it does show up on eBay from time to time.

 

That it isn't on Atarimania doesn't prove much, there are less rare programs that haven't been dumped at all... There are hundreds and hundreds of titles that still need to be added, not counting the ones that are constantly discovered.

 

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1 hour ago, www.atarimania.com said:

 

Rarity isn't scientific, of course, it's based on our experience and perception. A "10" is for software where one or two copies - or no copy at all! - have been found in ten or fifteen years, for instance. Super-Text is very rare but it does show up on eBay from time to time.

 

That it isn't on Atarimania doesn't prove much, there are less rare programs that haven't been dumped at all... There are hundreds and hundreds of titles that still need to be added, not counting the ones that are constantly discovered.

 

Sounds reasonable, indeed.

 

I would lie to you if I say they don't show up on eBay once every Martian Solstice... because I actually bought one sometime ago  (at a hard-to-pass deal...):

 

1698E09B-E765-46CC-9272-2AEC46129782.thumb.jpeg.3aa4b0f2af11d2d329d4502abc55042b.jpeg

 

I immediately performed a simply sector-level read for back-up purposes... and extracted an .ATR copy of it...

 

Here it is:

 

SuperText-BackUp.ATR

 

Hope you can try it and evaluate this rare piece of history...

Edited by Faicuai
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4 hours ago, flashjazzcat said:

Well, 'not blown away' was meant as a tactful understatement. There exist plenty of word processors written in the 1980s whose feature sets look extremely impressive on paper, and sometimes even in use as well. This does not appear to be one of those feature sets.

 

Aside from the (typical) narrow-mindedness when it came to integration with different disk operating systems, products like Paperclip and SuperScript are pretty damned powerful. TextPro (the real inspiration for TLW) even boasted full SpartaDOS subdirectory support, etc, but was less 'polished' and lacked the performance of a program like Paperclip.

 

I get the historical value, anyway, but as someone who gets excited when hearing about an Atari text editor I didn't already know about, I also get disappointed when I realise it's probably not going to motivate my competitive instincts. :)

Well, there is one little thing you may appreciate from SuperText, and that would be a 18+Kbytes single-buffer for text editing, when running on Invognito / 52Kbytes linear-ram mode...

 

And that's about it... ;-)

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The only thing I wish TLW could do is use DISK buffering for the working text instead of (limited) RAM buffering. Similar to how WordStar does it. Unlimited file size.

Maybe a different version for those with fast drives?

 

Other than that, I love TLW. Lots of features.

Night vs Day difference between the old WPs and TLW.

 

Dark to Light. Trust the Plan. :)

 

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39 minutes ago, Mathy said:

Nope, just a setting in the menu Jon could add.

The whole thing could be automatic and seamless to the end user, depending on the initial size and growth of the file. Unfortunately paging bits of the editor out to disk is a gargantuan headache that will require large amounts of the editor engine to be rewritten. The fact TLW uses a gap buffer actually helps here, a bit, but stuff like search and replace and cut and paste becomes exponentially complex.

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Hello Jon

 

Just an idea: Use a bank (or more) of memory as a buffer and use that to read to and write from disk.  That would decrease loading and saving time and speed up searching (since you'd search through memory instead of the disk).

 

But you probably already thought of that.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

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1 minute ago, Mathy said:

Just an idea: Use a bank (or more) of memory as a buffer and use that to read to and write from disk.  That would decrease loading and saving time and speed up searching (since you'd search through memory instead of the disk).

Well indeed: since many Ataris have 320, 576 or 1088KB of RAM, why not use extended memory? But it makes little practical difference whether chunks of the buffer are paged out to other memory banks or disk. Indeed, paging to disk is arguably faster than paging to RAM if a HDD is present; somewhat slower if not. The most flexible approach is to probably use a temporary file which could reside on a floppy, hard disk partition or RAMdisk.

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