Dell computers and experimentation

Journey,

I got my dos start with dos 3.3 on a 386. Before that I had a Kaypro using CPM of course. That Kaypro was quite a machine and with Dbase II, supercalc, and WordStar you had about every thing you needed. A Kaypro with a 10 meg hard drive was over $3,000. I stll remember the day I took my Kaypro home. It had WordStar and dBase II already installed. Supercalc I had to purchase. I still use Dbase and I have the original disks. It has its own programming language that gave you a lot of flexibility in designing your database and report forms.. Programming it was a lot like using COBOL which I learn program in in my first job in 1968 plus 1. I have used Dbase and Supercalc right up to the time I retired (This past December) to help track my budget at work. The budget was over million dollars.

WordStar was an incredible program and with it you could cut and paste(although it was control KC and control KW) and also used split screens that permitted having more than one document open at a time. WordStar had everything I ever needed. I still keep a copy of it on my computer and I used it for word processing up to about a couple of years ago when I had to start using MS Word.

WordStar would load a word processing document a megabyte big within a few seconds. Word took, even on a fast machine, a few minutes. God I miss CPM! I liked WordStar so much that I continued to use it in Windows. I think the last version was version 6 or 7 for windows. I still have the original disks. Supercalc and Dbase I continued to use right up to the time I retired. Fortunately all that software could run under Windows in the dos mode.

About the only thing the Microsoft products could do that the dos program couldn't is give you a good print out and some other so so razzle dazzle features that you really don't need.

Imagine that those programs ran under CPM with only 64k of memory and a 10 meg hard drive with still a lot of room of left for data files. Now that was some programming! Not the sloppy glut stuff that is available now and consumes most of the disk space.

Kaypro with CPM was so far ahead of IBM's pc and even faster if you added a turbo charger chip that gave you a whopping 5 mhz of speed, one mhz faster than the first IBM pc.

Now the early Macs were a marvel. But I was never comfortable using them as you don't get to see what is really going on like in dos. I really liked the command level languages like CPM and native dos rather than all the menu crap.

Larry