GILLMANN%USC-ISIB@sri-unix.UUCP (11/23/83)
From: Dick Gillmann <GILLMANN@USC-ISIB> As requested, I'm reporting on the delivery time for Microsoft Word from Conroy-LaPoint. They promised delivery in 6-7 working days. It arrived Tuesday just after I sent out the last digest, which was 7 working days, counting Veterans Day as a holiday, since I ordered it. Word is definitely nifty, but very complicated. I'm trying to devise a "style" package that would make it usuable as a program editor. Interfacing this beast to a laser printer would be a real breakthrough. The Microsoft mouse that came with it doesn't seem so bad. It is a mechanical mouse. The ball can be removed and cleaned like the Apple Lisa mouse, although the Microsoft ball is metal instead of rubber. I was able to warm boot it with no problem, with the mouse driver in my CONFIG.SYS file. This setup seems very XT oriented. The mouse card fits nicely in the unused short slot on the XT. All the programs are kept in a directory named /MSTOOLS and there are quite a few kilobytes involved. Word can be installed on the XT hard disk and no floppy is required to start it. It wouldn't be nearly as nice on a floppy based system.
notes@pur-ee.UUCP (11/29/83)
#R:sri-arpa:-1398600:ecn-ee:12700001:000:1266 ecn-ee!mahler Nov 28 08:23:00 1983 /***** pur-ee:net.micro.pc / sri-arpa!GILLMANN@USC-ISIB / 9:44 am Nov 27, 1983 */ From: Dick Gillmann <GILLMANN@USC-ISIB> As requested, I'm reporting on the delivery time for Microsoft Word from Conroy-LaPoint. They promised delivery in 6-7 working days. It arrived Tuesday just after I sent out the last digest, which was 7 working days, counting Veterans Day as a holiday, since I ordered it. Word is definitely nifty, but very complicated. I'm trying to devise a "style" package that would make it usuable as a program editor. Interfacing this beast to a laser printer would be a real breakthrough. The Microsoft mouse that came with it doesn't seem so bad. It is a mechanical mouse. The ball can be removed and cleaned like the Apple Lisa mouse, although the Microsoft ball is metal instead of rubber. I was able to warm boot it with no problem, with the mouse driver in my CONFIG.SYS file. This setup seems very XT oriented. The mouse card fits nicely in the unused short slot on the XT. All the programs are kept in a directory named /MSTOOLS and there are quite a few kilobytes involved. Word can be installed on the XT hard disk and no floppy is required to start it. It wouldn't be nearly as nice on a floppy based system. /* ---------- */
GFISHER%USC-ECLB@sri-unix.UUCP (12/16/83)
I bought Microsoft WORD. There is a "program" diskette that contains a lot of files that is used when WORD is run. According to the documentation, program disk files may be placed in any directory as long as that directory is included in the search path. So I put the program disk files on a hard disk in a directory given in the search path. Unfortunately that did not work. The floppy disk version does not use the search path: it only looks on drive A:. This is a bug, according to Microsoft, that will be fixed in later versions. It did not do to make A a hard disk volume. I got around this by using the assign command to assign A to the hard disk volume that contained the program files. Gerry
Celoni@SU-SCORE.ARPA (12/16/83)
From: Jim Celoni S.J. <Celoni@SU-SCORE.ARPA> Here are some notes on Microsoft Word. To the best of my knowledge they're correct and nothing is proprietary: How is newline included in search or replace text? Search text only: ^n matches newline, ^t tab, ^p/^d paragraph/division mark. How is a standard ASCII (non-Word-format) document (i.e. w/ CRLFs) reformatted? Word doesn't change chars inside the file, so first remove crlfs, tabs, and extra whitespace manually, then attach a style sheet and print. (Word format has all char/graf/div formatting info at end of file.) Can Word hyphenate even if I don't insert discretionary hyphens? When the online dictionary-based spelling checker is added, yes. Can I put anything in a file? (Alt-nn doesn't work for ^@, ^M, and ^_.) No; certain chars (9..13, 31, 196, 255) are reserved for leader dots, discretionary hyphens, non-breaking spaces. How do I provide arguments (e.g., to make a line of 72 "-"s, delete 100 lines, or find the 4th occurrence)? You can't. What can I do with "divisions"? Change params in "format division" menu, and have different running heads. Can I refer to sections/pages as in FinalWord/Scribe (@ref, @pageref)? References aren't supported. Printer support: Can I give Word a translation table? Will Word handle delays? Is it smart about print head motion (using bare CRs, BSs, escape sequences, hardware tabs)? How do I add a new printer? Printer description (PRD) file includes a translation table that maps single chars to either 1 or 2 (overstruck) chars. No delays yet. Word isn't smart about head motion, but printers are (usually w/ whitespace and bidirection). Word doesn't use printer tabs. Word 1.0 can't be customized for a printer incompatible w/ one officially supported. Does the Microsoft mouse card for IBM fit in a small XT slot? Yes. (The generic mouse uses a serial port.) Does the mouse come with enough software and documentation to program for it? Interface is well-documented. Now only a few demos are available, but watch for a menu-oriented mouse-keyboard driver that allows you to define your own tree of menus and translate both motions and clicks to keyboard input. Does Word take advantage of extra RAM it knows about? All overlays fit in 256K, but scratch files are still used during editing and printing. How is Word written/compiled? C is compiled to pseudocode which is interpreted. Some C is compiled to 8086 code. Commands: When choosing commands, first letter, space, and BS work but not <- or ->; when choosing subcommands, only tab and [awkward] shift-backtab (again not arrows) work. Without a mouse, filling in parameters is quite tedious. Transfer Load: Loading over an unsaved file doesn't warn me but isn't undoable. If I hit enter instead of <- in TL's parameter (e.g., *.txt CR but intending to see all the .txt-files), Word takes it and names the file "*.txt". Pathnames seem to cause problems: if I have a file a\b\c.d, TL a\b\c.d CR reads it but TL a\b\*.* <- gives "Empty" or whatever the previous list was. Features: Printed documents don't have widows or orphans. It's great to attach a style sheet and then change looks here and there. There are equivalents to some Bravo looks (e.g., visible, hardcopy, all/same, keep [for paragraphs]. Word's "beep" beats DOS's, but "mute" is nice. (Even when mute, Word beeps when I fill the typeahead buffer.) Closing question: Mouse Systems Corp. says their [optical] mouse behaves absolutely identically to Microsoft's when running Microsoft software--have any readers verified this? [Yes, it works. -Ed.] Incidentally, have you found yourself, like me, typing Word commands into a file? I compensated by using ESC more often than necessary. +j (not affiliated with Microsoft)
weems%umass-cs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa (03/07/84)
From: Charles Weems <weems%umass-cs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> I was allowed to play with Word at a local dealer for several hours. My general impressions are that I like it but it has some definite shortcomings. Some problems I ran into were: Very slow start-up, very slow file writes to floppy. The screen area is only 19 lines long because they use fixed, rather than pop-up, menus. The style sheets are difficult to deal with and poorly documented (however they are also very powerful -- probably a good design choice if only the help info and manuals would explain them). The command system is a bit baroque without the mouse. With the mouse I found editing to be very quick and easy. The editor shows you exactly how the document will appear except for page breaks, headings, line numbers and so on. Word has a number of very nice features. The mouse works very well. It does cut-and-paste very quickly. You can do multiple columns. Italics, boldface and underlines all show up on the screen. It can also be used for writing raw text files (like source code). It has a built in glossary system that allows you to write with abbreviations that it fills in for you. It supports a good collection of printers. The new version (due out real-soon-now) will allow you to define your own printer driver through an interactive driver-builder. They specifically claim that this will make it possible to use laser printers. In summary, I really liked a lot of the things that they did. I can deal with most of the faults. I would only recommend using it with the mouse.