Re: How to make money fast (in science fiction)

In rec.arts.sf.science David Friedman <ddfr@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
> In article <1206999248.452920@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> Michael Ash <mike@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 
>> A word 
>> processor from 20 years ago would be rendering bitmapped fonts with 
>> pixel-granular spacing and showing you maybe a paragraph or two at a
time. 
>> A modern word processor will show you a couple of pages at a time, 
>> rendering vector fonts with subpixel antialiasing and layout, all the 
>> while doing dynamic spelling and grammar checking, and it's *still*
vastly 
>> faster. 
> 
> I think you exaggerate. I wrote a book with a word processor more than 
> twenty years ago. As best I recall, it showed about 14 or 22 lines of 
> text at a reasonable width--64 or 80 characters--which is usually more 
> than a paragraph or two. And it wasn't vastly slower than Word running 
> on a current Mac. 
> 
> My multiple figures are because the LNW80 could function like the TRS80 
> it was a superclone of, giving a 16x64 character screen, or use its own 
> high res graphics for 24x80; I think I had a word processor that worked 
> in the latter format but am not certain.

It sounds like you're talking about console-based word processors, giving 
you monospaced fonts and no graphics capabilities, whereas I was referring

to a word processor running in a windowing system such as the Macintosh or

Microsoft Windows, rendering pro****tional text with bitmapped fonts. Such 
systems are significantly more capable than the console-based systems, but

if you want to make your stuff run fast, pu****ng all text rendering into 
the video hardware and making every character the same width is a great 
way to do it.

Also I tend to ignore Microsoft products when talking about modern 
computing. I know they're used a lot, I just do my best never to use them 
personally, so I often forget that they're there. Microsoft Office does 
seem to be an example of a product which *does* get a lot slower as time 
goes on for no particularly good reason.

-- 
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software