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

In article <1207010034.220783@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
 Michael Ash <mike@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> 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.

I thought you were comparing the pre-Mac word processors with the modern 
ones, so I took LeScript, which I was running on my LNW before I got a 
Mac, to compare. Obviously it didn't have the modern graphics 
capability. But it showed more than a paragraph or two, and was not 
vastly slower.

If the comparison is to the early WYSIWYG word processors, such as 
MacWrite, then your statement is even more of an exaggeration.

-- 
 http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
 Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
 Published by Baen, in bookstores now