Tuesday, June 23, 2009

RJS on WordStar cited in paper about accessibility for the blind

Stumbled on this quite by accident, and found it an interesting coincidence, given that my current novel, Wake, deals with a blind teenager trying to deal with computers: a January 2006 technical paper entitled "A Personal Information Management Approach for People With Low Vision or Blindness" by Silas S. Brown and Peter Robinson of University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory -- which quotes at length my 1990 essay entitled "WordStar: A Writer's Wordprocessor."

The paper appeared in the newsletter of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing -- and, in another coincidence, the last page of the current Communications of the ACM is a piece by me about the science behind Wake.
Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com

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Posted by Rob on Tuesday, June 23, 2009
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5 comments

5 Comments:

At June 23, 2009 4:07 PM , Blogger Annie P said...

Hi Rob,
Did even you imagine how far we'd go?

Glad you're having so much success with your latest book.

Anne
Creative Fusion

 
At June 23, 2009 4:33 PM , Blogger RobertJSawyer said...

Hey, Annie! Great to see you here! We've both come a long way, haven't we? Big hug!

 
At June 23, 2009 5:46 PM , Blogger Farrell J. McGovern said...

I still agree that the Wordstar interface is superior for touchtypists! In fact, all of my heavy duty editing and writing is still done on a WS clone called JOE, which stands for Joes Own Editor, which will emulate WS if you invoke it as "jstar". It runs on just about every Unix flavour out there, including Linux and Mac OS X.

 
At June 24, 2009 7:45 AM , Blogger gpaciga said...

What word processor do you use now?

I was going to say a unix program like emacs could probably be made into (possibly has been made into) a WS clone quite easily, but I guess that already exists in JOE as well.

 
At June 24, 2009 2:13 PM , Blogger RobertJSawyer said...

I still use WordStar for DOS (Version 7.0, Revision D -- the final one -- came out in 1992.

That said, I have it extensively customized, run the 1990 DOS macro program SmartKey 6.0g Advanced on top of it, and run WordStar under 4DOS 7.5 and TameDOS on a Windows XP system.

 

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