Jim Fox was a key programmer for WordStar. He never got much credit. I guess because he was just an employee.
Jim thought, and talked about WordStar up until his death a few years ago on the streets of San Rafael.
I’m posting this because he would want it. Jim was so proud of his contributions to WordStar, and told anyone who was within speaking distance. Jim was pretty happy guy, but couldn’t find work, and wasn’t near crazy enough to get SSI. He was just a bit different (only different after being on the streets. He once told me, a year on the street, and the mind goes. (I didn’t see anything wrong with his mind though), and getting a programming job after 45 is difficult?
He told me a a small company (called a Startup now) hired him, but they didn’t give him time catch up. He was homeless for years, and his skills were rusty, and his suit was from a Goodwill drop box. He told me, “I was almost up to speed, and feel like I will be contributing soon.” A week later he was back in his Penguin Suit doing dances for change in downtown San Rafael. He was also the Webmaster for the Coastal Post in Bolinas. They couldn’t pay him, and he was fine with that. He also had some good ideas, but people didn’t take him serious? He had a website called Cyberthings.
I’m writing this because I heard about WordStar so much, and I like Jim. People called him eccentric, but he just didn’t have a home. Jim knew a lot of people. A couple of wealthy guys let Jim sleep on their property, but the wives didn’t like him there. I get it. It’s still a responsibility to have a homeless guy camping on your property. Jim always graciously left if asked, and never held a grudge. He used to say to me, “I just don’t want to die of pneumonia on one of these cold side streets.” I never knew what to say.
I writing this because I read he died a few years ago, and miss the guy. The San Rafael police went out of their way to mess with him. Instead of helping, they just wanted to nail him for anything. He once got a Jaywalking ticket after asking a cop to retrieve his stolen laptop. The cop said no, so Jim walked across the street. The cop crossed the street, and gave him a ticket.
Wow, that is touching. I remember seeing the name "Jim Fox" when using Wordstar back when I was in school in India in 1997.
As a kid I thought it was a pseudonym. I did at some point wonder, what he went on to build. Your description of what he was going through, makes me hope that his memory will be well honored.
Your rambling is very much appreciated. I'm terribly sorry to hear about Jim Fox, it is often those who are the real knowledge behind development that get lost or left behind for a multitude of reasons, which, more often than not, are problems or a fallout with financial backers, entrepreneurs or it's the work of ruthless competitors. Unfortunately, this happens not only in programming and IT but in every endeavor imaginable. Other names in the IT game that immediately come to mind that fit this description are Gary Kildall, Phil Katz and Aaron Swartz; they all deserved a much better run.
I mentioned here in another post that I used to use WordStar to write/edit assembly (ASM) as well as high-level languages source files and the illustration I've used is an excerpt from the BIOS of my Godbout CompuPro 816 S-100 8085/8086 dual boot computer. You mentioned Jim Fox for a very good reason and I similarly do so for Bill Godbout who died tragically in the Camp fire in November 2018. You'll be aware of the fire but some who are not in CA may not be:
Bill Godbout may not have remembered me but I certainly remember him. I met him in Anaheim at a computer conference and I talked with him for ages about CompuPro and his S-100 boards—I even recall a three-way conversation with him when someone inquired about the reliability of his memory boards. The conversation revolved around a then common concern about the potential for new high speed RAM with a clock speed of 20MHz [wow!] in that stray random alpha particles may cause memory errors and thus we should always employ parity checking to avoid the problems. In fact, it was Bill who actually raised the matter.
He was a very pleasant and helpful guy and I'm so pleased to have met him. To think he died in a fire—in one of the most horrible ways imaginable—is hard to contemplate. It is especially hard and upsetting when the person who has died is not just another statistic but someone one can actually put a face to.
Re Jim Fox again, I recall another conversation not with Rubinstein but with a local WordStar agent around the time of the release of WordStar 2000 but mainly about the development of version 7 and earlier (as that's where my interests were). He told me much about it and I'm now racking my brain to remember what he said. The only thing that comes to mind was that it was mainly the work of one person (this seemed a bit strange to me as I thought that MicroPro would have had many more programmers). I also seem to recall an article about the development of WordStar written by either Jerry Pournelle of Byte fame (who had a CompuPro system) or perhaps it was in InfoWorld. It's a damn nuisance I can't remember.
I've used many wordprocessors but WordStar still is my favorite, I first used it under CP/M and later on the IBM PC. Anyone who has used it knows that once you got the feel for the WordStar keystroke diamond it was magic to use. I still have hundreds of files in WordStar format and I can either import them into a GUI WYSIWYG WP or I can still use them in WordStar 7 running under an emulated environment in Windows.
WordStar came in various varieties with version 7 the last before it changed direction to WordStar 2000 (which, incidentally, was well before the year 2000). This put death knell on WordStar as its
keystrokes were different to previous ones. Making a stupid and unpopular change like that ought to be a lesson for every software developer
When WordStar 2000 was released I recall that when at an exhibition having an argument with Seymour Rubinstein, CEO of MicroPro, WS's developer, about these stupid changes. I told him bluntly that I would not be upgrading from version 7 as I saw no reason why I should relearn all the hard-earned keystrokes for little advantage. The fact that WordStar 2000 failed, it seems that I was far from being alone with that view.
Incidentally, for those who are not familiar with WordStar, MicroPro or Seymour Rubinstein—Seymour Rubinstein was the inventor of the now infamous EULA—End User License Agreement! WordStar was close to the first program to have an EULA attached (from memory I think WordMaster (an earlier WP that predated WordStar), was actually first—someone correct me if I'm wrong).
reminds me of Alias software (Maya but maybe others) use or layout as ergonomics.
They used QWER and ZXCV as main rapid keybindings for the most used operations (pick, translate, rotate, scale). You didn't have to invest more than 20 seconds to remember that.
A lot of knowledge of this kind is probably locked in old forgotten ware.
Indeed, such a boost in ergonomics and productivity with just a "simple" choice.
Btw, I was always amazed by people breaking this functionality by insisting using other keyboard layouts, more appropriate for text.
Think you're right, it rings bell (albeit faint). Did the Wang wordprocessor use it too? (I used a Wang WP a few times long ago but I've no idea now. In fact the Wang was the very first WP I used — except for KP26/29 card punches with an IBM-360.) :-)
From memory—it's been a long time—WordMaster was MicroPro's first product so presumably Rubinstein applied the EULA to it first (thus it was likely the first with an EULA). If not, then I'd guess he'd have applied the EULA with later issues/releases as WordMaster was also concurrently available along with WordStar.
Anyone with an original CP/M WordMaster 8" floppy (or its contents) to check?
Yeah, right, it's usually the case, but I've used MS Word, LibO, and many others since that time and for a much longer time than I ever used WordStar (consistently that is). The difference with WordStar is that one doesn't get sidetracked with layout and other futzing about, it was all WP without distractions.
I don't have a deep personal affectation for WordStar, although I do appreciate it's keyboard layout, but what I do miss is writers having opinions about these things.
These days it seems that it's mostly "whatever version of Word that came with my Laptop/Times New Roman 12".
We programmers still have our "holy wars" (although I see a decrease of passion here, too, with safe choices like VSC or IntelliJ being more and more the default.)
But back in the days, even writers with non-CS backgrounds could wax poetic about XyWrite vs. WordStar vs. Word (DOS/Win/Mac) vs WordPerfect. (Heck, WordPerfect even made lawyers have an opinion of their own)
Those debates continue - to Scrivener or not to Scrivener is quite the topic with long-form writers. And Final Draft is heavily discussed.
But the reason the debate is dying out is because the competition is dying out: Word won. And that doesn’t mean the app, it means all the Simonyi-type ways of thinking it brings with it: paragraph-level formatting with overrides, single frame with embeds, no visible codes beyond P-marks, output-dependent page definition, local fonts, etc.
It’s like if all editors were just vi variants and nobody was trying anything else any longer.
Which is a damn shame, because there are an awful lot of alternative approaches to rich document creation that could be explored, especially now the printed page is probably the least important part of things, but developers don’t care (plain text obsessives, usually) and the industry doesn’t (because competing with Word and GDocs doesn’t make you rich).
Instead what action there would be in the space has moved to things like Notion. Which is great for note-takers, less so for writers.
I’m in a couple of chats with writers. There are constant discussions about tools: Google Docs, Word, Apple Pages, Scrivener, and even vim with markdown and git.
We all have different tools and different ways of writing. We’ve shared photos of our workspaces.
A lot of this doesn’t happen in public anymore because we’ve moved to chat programs like Telegram and Discord.
It's much more than footnotes. Courts have a lot of very picky formatting requirements, plus lawyers care a lot about presentation. Reveal codes is the thing about WordPerfect that lawyers love the most, because it gives you fine grained control over that stuff on a character/word level without having to pray to the Word Styles god.
I work in legal software for courts and attorneys and can confirm WordPerfect is very much used by filing attorneys. Within the courts though, everything is typically PDF once filed.
If I remember correctly, this was also the default editor in the early SuSE distributions or early Slackware. Joe is also used by Bisqwit (https://github.com/bisqwit/that_editor).
I've been using joe since the 90s. One time I was helping someone with their computer and they used WordStar, so I knew the keybindings pretty much for free.
I began using WordStar in 1980 for development (in "non-document mode") on CP/M. It was the best thing ever available for that platform, and it had some features that I've never seen duplicated elsewhere (such as "column mode" cut and paste). Back when I was using it, the standard computer keyboard had the "control" key directly to the left of the "A" key (where the "Caps Lock" key is now). I was never happy that IBM moved the control key, and I was even less happy when Sun Microsystems followed suit (but for a while you could still order the Sun keyboards with the control key in the right place). I got in bad habit of moving my left hand one key left so I could use my left pinky to hold control down while using the "magic diamond" to move the cursor around. It took me many years to un-learn that bad habit.
By 1996 (when this article was written) WordStar had already committed suicide by pushing "WordStar 2000" on everybody, which completely broke the old user interface.
> Back when I was using it, the standard computer keyboard had the "control" key directly to the left of the "A" key (where the "Caps Lock" key is now).
One of the first things I do is rebind caps to control - I've never understood the need for a caps lock key
" I was never happy that IBM moved the control key, and I was even less happy when Sun Microsystems followed suit (but for a while you could still order the Sun keyboards with the control key in the right place)"
You weren't alone, that was contentious because of WordStar's keystrokes and other earlier terminals. Incidentally, I first entered text into WordStar using a VT100 terminal connected to a Godbout S100 dual-CPU (8085/8086) computer.
"By 1996 (when this article was written) WordStar had already committed suicide by pushing "WordStar 2000" on everybody, which completely broke the old user interface."
Note my earlier post re my conversation with Seymour Rubinstein. Many took him to task over the 'suicidal' change.
In my first job (early 80s), we wrote 6809 assembly in Wordstar using non-document mode. It worked very well for that purpose.
We had a Molecular Supermicro 32, basically a card cage for Z80 boards running CP/M and sharing a small (large at the time!) hard drive. My first task there was pulling serial cables to the engineering lab to hook up terminals. We had a band printer for program listings (aka backups) and a ball printer for docs. Good times.
For the graphically oriented, TextMate has had columnar cursor and clipboard operations since 2005, IIRC, and recent versions of Xcode also have a good implementation.
WordStar was actually also a pretty good programming editor - I used it on Z80 CP/M and 8088 IBM systems for programming.
On the Z80, I actually had to write small assembly language routines to read the keyboard and write to the screen (by default it came with integration with CP/M only, which was pretty poor), for which WordStar provided quite a good patching tool to integrate the routines into the main executable. You could also do scary things with the printer interface.
You're right, here's the intro of one the ASM files for my CP/M S-100 computer, it's straight from my WordStar archives. The bare-bones, skeletal outline files came from the board manufacturer but it was constantly tweaked and recompiled using WordStar. The file is 107k bytes long (all preliminaries incl. revs deleted):
WordStar used as editor here:
"<...>
; ========================== Copyright 1983, CompuPro Corporation.
; || HMX1BIOS.ASM ||
; ==========================
; CONSTANTS:
VERS EQU 22
; CP/M version number
CBIOSV EQU 'N' ;CBIOS revision level (2.2x) (CompuPro level)
; LIBRARY CONSTANTS:
MACLIB COMPUPRO ;Disk and Serial/Parallel interface constants
MACLIB ASCII ;Mnemonics for common ASCII, other special characters
MACLIB ACTIVE ;Flags directing construction for the various
;CompuPro products to "customize" the BIOS
MACLIB CPMDISK ;CP/M disk defaults, CBIOS offsets, BDOS functions
MACLIB BOOTSCPM ;CP/M cold/warm boot routines for each of the
;possible controller types
; PROGRAM:
; The next statement produces a harmless error message if MAC is used instead.
ASEG ;Used Digital Research RMAC assembler and
ORG BIOS ;LINK linker to assemble this code
JMP CBOOT ;+00h Cold boot
<...>"
Oh for the days when we could actually compile our own BIOSes to suit our needs!
I built a Z80 machine a couple of years ago and have had great fun learning about CP/M on it, I'm curious what was poor about using the BDOS (I assume) to access the keyboard?
BDOS was slow, and depending on platform might not support single keystrokes or single screen updates well. Going through the machines BIOS (or direct hardware access) was generally much more satisfactory, and you could also take advantage of the hardware peculiarities, which BDOS didn't unless it had been well-tailored, which it often wasn't.
I am a big fan of Robert J. Sawyer. He is like Michael Crichton, except tech things go good instead of bad.
On the topic of word processors: The famed New Yorker writer John McPhee only writes with Kedit, which I had never even heard of until he spoke of it a lot in his book on writing. I seem to recall a story of him needing to pin down the orginal creator at some point, well after the creator had abandoned the project, for some tech support.
I think you are right. I think he used the line filter features to drill down to specific parts of a book he was working on.
It sounds very cool, but I wouldn't want to be bound to a mainly abandoned text editor if I were one of the most celebrated non-fiction writers. Although maybe it is his secret sauce?
Readit News
Jim thought, and talked about WordStar up until his death a few years ago on the streets of San Rafael.
I’m posting this because he would want it. Jim was so proud of his contributions to WordStar, and told anyone who was within speaking distance. Jim was pretty happy guy, but couldn’t find work, and wasn’t near crazy enough to get SSI. He was just a bit different (only different after being on the streets. He once told me, a year on the street, and the mind goes. (I didn’t see anything wrong with his mind though), and getting a programming job after 45 is difficult?
He told me a a small company (called a Startup now) hired him, but they didn’t give him time catch up. He was homeless for years, and his skills were rusty, and his suit was from a Goodwill drop box. He told me, “I was almost up to speed, and feel like I will be contributing soon.” A week later he was back in his Penguin Suit doing dances for change in downtown San Rafael. He was also the Webmaster for the Coastal Post in Bolinas. They couldn’t pay him, and he was fine with that. He also had some good ideas, but people didn’t take him serious? He had a website called Cyberthings.
I’m writing this because I heard about WordStar so much, and I like Jim. People called him eccentric, but he just didn’t have a home. Jim knew a lot of people. A couple of wealthy guys let Jim sleep on their property, but the wives didn’t like him there. I get it. It’s still a responsibility to have a homeless guy camping on your property. Jim always graciously left if asked, and never held a grudge. He used to say to me, “I just don’t want to die of pneumonia on one of these cold side streets.” I never knew what to say.
I writing this because I read he died a few years ago, and miss the guy. The San Rafael police went out of their way to mess with him. Instead of helping, they just wanted to nail him for anything. He once got a Jaywalking ticket after asking a cop to retrieve his stolen laptop. The cop said no, so Jim walked across the street. The cop crossed the street, and gave him a ticket.
Sorry for rambling. Not in a great mood.
As a kid I thought it was a pseudonym. I did at some point wonder, what he went on to build. Your description of what he was going through, makes me hope that his memory will be well honored.
I mentioned here in another post that I used to use WordStar to write/edit assembly (ASM) as well as high-level languages source files and the illustration I've used is an excerpt from the BIOS of my Godbout CompuPro 816 S-100 8085/8086 dual boot computer. You mentioned Jim Fox for a very good reason and I similarly do so for Bill Godbout who died tragically in the Camp fire in November 2018. You'll be aware of the fire but some who are not in CA may not be:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/11/25/camp-fire-d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Godbout
http://vcfed.org/wp/2018/11/13/r-i-p-bill-godbout-79/
Bill Godbout may not have remembered me but I certainly remember him. I met him in Anaheim at a computer conference and I talked with him for ages about CompuPro and his S-100 boards—I even recall a three-way conversation with him when someone inquired about the reliability of his memory boards. The conversation revolved around a then common concern about the potential for new high speed RAM with a clock speed of 20MHz [wow!] in that stray random alpha particles may cause memory errors and thus we should always employ parity checking to avoid the problems. In fact, it was Bill who actually raised the matter.
He was a very pleasant and helpful guy and I'm so pleased to have met him. To think he died in a fire—in one of the most horrible ways imaginable—is hard to contemplate. It is especially hard and upsetting when the person who has died is not just another statistic but someone one can actually put a face to.
Re Jim Fox again, I recall another conversation not with Rubinstein but with a local WordStar agent around the time of the release of WordStar 2000 but mainly about the development of version 7 and earlier (as that's where my interests were). He told me much about it and I'm now racking my brain to remember what he said. The only thing that comes to mind was that it was mainly the work of one person (this seemed a bit strange to me as I thought that MicroPro would have had many more programmers). I also seem to recall an article about the development of WordStar written by either Jerry Pournelle of Byte fame (who had a CompuPro system) or perhaps it was in InfoWorld. It's a damn nuisance I can't remember.
Deleted Comment
WordStar came in various varieties with version 7 the last before it changed direction to WordStar 2000 (which, incidentally, was well before the year 2000). This put death knell on WordStar as its keystrokes were different to previous ones. Making a stupid and unpopular change like that ought to be a lesson for every software developer
When WordStar 2000 was released I recall that when at an exhibition having an argument with Seymour Rubinstein, CEO of MicroPro, WS's developer, about these stupid changes. I told him bluntly that I would not be upgrading from version 7 as I saw no reason why I should relearn all the hard-earned keystrokes for little advantage. The fact that WordStar 2000 failed, it seems that I was far from being alone with that view.
Incidentally, for those who are not familiar with WordStar, MicroPro or Seymour Rubinstein—Seymour Rubinstein was the inventor of the now infamous EULA—End User License Agreement! WordStar was close to the first program to have an EULA attached (from memory I think WordMaster (an earlier WP that predated WordStar), was actually first—someone correct me if I'm wrong).
reminds me of Alias software (Maya but maybe others) use or layout as ergonomics.
They used QWER and ZXCV as main rapid keybindings for the most used operations (pick, translate, rotate, scale). You didn't have to invest more than 20 seconds to remember that.
A lot of knowledge of this kind is probably locked in old forgotten ware.
From a cursory search, it seems that WordMaster is the direct predecessor to WordStar, programmed by the same person.
Anyone with an original CP/M WordMaster 8" floppy (or its contents) to check?
The best X is the X you know.
These days it seems that it's mostly "whatever version of Word that came with my Laptop/Times New Roman 12".
We programmers still have our "holy wars" (although I see a decrease of passion here, too, with safe choices like VSC or IntelliJ being more and more the default.) But back in the days, even writers with non-CS backgrounds could wax poetic about XyWrite vs. WordStar vs. Word (DOS/Win/Mac) vs WordPerfect. (Heck, WordPerfect even made lawyers have an opinion of their own)
But the reason the debate is dying out is because the competition is dying out: Word won. And that doesn’t mean the app, it means all the Simonyi-type ways of thinking it brings with it: paragraph-level formatting with overrides, single frame with embeds, no visible codes beyond P-marks, output-dependent page definition, local fonts, etc.
It’s like if all editors were just vi variants and nobody was trying anything else any longer.
Which is a damn shame, because there are an awful lot of alternative approaches to rich document creation that could be explored, especially now the printed page is probably the least important part of things, but developers don’t care (plain text obsessives, usually) and the industry doesn’t (because competing with Word and GDocs doesn’t make you rich).
Instead what action there would be in the space has moved to things like Notion. Which is great for note-takers, less so for writers.
Where could I find such discussions? Do you remember any links?
We all have different tools and different ways of writing. We’ve shared photos of our workspaces.
A lot of this doesn’t happen in public anymore because we’ve moved to chat programs like Telegram and Discord.
IIRC, WordPerfect is only still a thing because Word still does not do footnotes the way lawyers like (and courts require).
WordStar: A Writer’s Word Processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898950 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)
WordTsar – A Wordstar clone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549189 - July 2018 (85 comments, including "My dad, Seymour Rubinstein, created WordStar." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557412)
WordStar: A writer’s word processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13899238 - March 2017 (1 comment)
WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13850693 - March 2017 (106 comments)
What ever happened to Wordstar? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185 - July 2016 (169 comments)
WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272952 - Sept 2014 (5 comments)
George R.R. Martin Writes Everything In WordStar 4.0 On A DOS Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744952 - May 2014 (33 comments)
A Song of DOS and WordStar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732320 - May 2014 (13 comments)
[1] https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/
By 1996 (when this article was written) WordStar had already committed suicide by pushing "WordStar 2000" on everybody, which completely broke the old user interface.
One of the first things I do is rebind caps to control - I've never understood the need for a caps lock key
You weren't alone, that was contentious because of WordStar's keystrokes and other earlier terminals. Incidentally, I first entered text into WordStar using a VT100 terminal connected to a Godbout S100 dual-CPU (8085/8086) computer.
"By 1996 (when this article was written) WordStar had already committed suicide by pushing "WordStar 2000" on everybody, which completely broke the old user interface."
Note my earlier post re my conversation with Seymour Rubinstein. Many took him to task over the 'suicidal' change.
We had a Molecular Supermicro 32, basically a card cage for Z80 boards running CP/M and sharing a small (large at the time!) hard drive. My first task there was pulling serial cables to the engineering lab to hook up terminals. We had a band printer for program listings (aka backups) and a ball printer for docs. Good times.
Emacs (of course) has rectangles.
On the Z80, I actually had to write small assembly language routines to read the keyboard and write to the screen (by default it came with integration with CP/M only, which was pretty poor), for which WordStar provided quite a good patching tool to integrate the routines into the main executable. You could also do scary things with the printer interface.
WordStar used as editor here:
Oh for the days when we could actually compile our own BIOSes to suit our needs!On the topic of word processors: The famed New Yorker writer John McPhee only writes with Kedit, which I had never even heard of until he spoke of it a lot in his book on writing. I seem to recall a story of him needing to pin down the orginal creator at some point, well after the creator had abandoned the project, for some tech support.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/structure
https://www.kedit.com/
It sounds very cool, but I wouldn't want to be bound to a mainly abandoned text editor if I were one of the most celebrated non-fiction writers. Although maybe it is his secret sauce?