I think everyone who spent time computing in the 80s & 90s has at least one tale of woe relating to forgetting to save or crashing before a save or tripping over a power plug, etc.
In retrospect it seems pretty wild that users were expected to actuate an explicit “save” command and that word processors didn’t just handle this automatically.
I’m sure there were real reasons - I was never involved in DOS or Windows programming but I presume it had to do with the slowness of saving to disk (and that a background auto-save wasn’t technically possible?). Or did we just not yet collectively have enough experience to know that auto saving was something critical to writers…?
Imagine the entire machine coming to a halt, ignoring input, and making grinding noises for 5-10 seconds. That's what saving a small file was like in the floppy disk era. If that was happening randomly while you're trying to type something, you'd go crazy.
Apart from the lack of sophistication regarding background saving, the two main reasons were
a) writing to disk was inherently dangerous: file systems of the time were not robust, so anything going wrong while updating metadata (in particular) could trash not just your file but the whole filesystem. Floppies were slow and machines were crashier, making the whole operation riskier; and
b) using floppies reduces their lifespan because the disk physically rubs against both the read/write heads and the internal padding of its casing, so typically they were only accessed as part of an explicit user request.
Saving did take time, but multitasking was a rarity, as was multithreading. Machines only had so much spare cpu and ram, too.
I'd expect autosave to prevent typing, which would bogart the workflow. I can envision doing quick incremental saves, maybe, but then you'd probably get jittery behaviour.
If we're talking mid 80s, something like the c64 would need assembly to handle anything like that I'd think.
I remember writing a BBS in basic, and just typing for an afternoon and running out of ram. I had to create separate modules for the up/download area, the message board, file transfer, and so on, all loaded off of... there was a commodore 1M floppy drive I used.
Given that Mr. Carter received a special disk with which he retrieved the lost material, it seems more like he accidentally deleted it, rather than just failing to save it.
You have inspired more questions about incremental saves: speed was an obvious issue with personal computers, but was it implemented on any minis or mainframes? These were multiuser systems (i.e. multitasking), so they could do background disk I/O. Also, would it be a possibility on some personal computers? For example: 8-bit Commodore computers had their own CPU and could operate indepedently from the computer, while the 6809 was famous for being sophisticated enough to support multitasking (e.g. OS-9). Even less sophistcated machines could do I/O in the background if the disk controller signalled the completion of a read/write operation via interrupts.
I'm asking because it is also possible that such features weren't implemented because the weren't thought of or because the defied contemporary expectations.
> The Lanier machine, which sells for about $12,000, takes up about the same amount of desk space as an electric typewriter but is taller by a foot or more because of the cathode-ray display screen.
It is amazing how much the price of word processors has declined over the years. It has dropped from $12,000 to free, provided you have a PC on which to run it:
I wonder if President Carter had to pay for his or if it was free for him given that having him use it was likely was a great advertising opportunity at the time.
Just noting for the record that Openoffice has tons of security problems and no development happening. Apache won't retire the project because they have some kind of MBA-brained theory that the 'brand' is worth misleading people.
That is a popular remark by libre office fans, but it is not true when I look at commit counts. As for security issues, it is interesting how nobody repeating this ever can cite any known security flaws. A quick comparison between the open office security bulletin and recently published CVEs (2023 or more recent) suggests that they are all fixed.
Note that two of the ones in the mitre results are in a PHP project that is not part of the Open Office code base.
Unless you can prove otherwise, it looks to me like people saying this are spreading FUD. The GitHub commit analysis shows an active project, although not as active as libre office, so the remarks about Open Office being a dead project are exaggerations at best and outright lies at worst.
Finally, I would like to remark that it is ridiculous to complain because I cited an open source project you do not use/like. This is vim vs emacs levels of nonsense.
I did not even use the term fanboyism, but as long as we are using psychological terms to describe behavior, may I suggest you had a Freudian slip?
I am the one being jumped by you and others for mentioning a competing office suite's word processor in a price comparison. You asked me to look closer, so I did and found that the claims being made against Open Office were baseless. You did not like that, so you made yet another unfounded accusation, this time targeting me.
By the way, I use Google Docs, so I have little interest in either project. However, the FUD being spread against Open Office by LibreOffice proponents has damaged LibreOffice in my eyes.
A concept can be expressed countless ways using countless vocabulary. You don't have to use the word "fanboy" or even the word "fan" to communicate fanboy, and you did literally say "fan" for all that.
FUD is not what's being said about Open Office. There is no fear, or uncertainty, or doubt being employed. There is simply a direct claim being asserted that practically all of the developers and maintainers of OO one day created LibreOffice and they are all there now, and OO has had nothing remotely like the development of LO since then.
That assertion may or may not be accurate, or the facts may or may not have changed in the last few years, but it's nature is not FUD.
Almost all of those commits (for years) are one-liner patches to documentation and/or spellcheck dictionaries. Do not mistake activity for development. The entire objective of the current Openoffice developers is convincing people that the project is still alive. The only new feature development happens when someone backports something from Libreoffice (which is getting more difficult as Openoffice falls further behind) or panicked development to fix the onslaught of CVEs.
It's been over year since the last release, because there is no release manager. 4.2.0 was scheduled for "2024" and they have about two days left to hit that target. They published the dev preview for this version in 2019. They still don't support Apple Silicon nor do they yet have a build for 64-bit Windows.
If you bring your concerns to the developers mailing list, they call you a sock puppet and return to fiddling with localization files. The localization is supposedly the main blocker for the 4.2.0 release but they're not even sure if it's done.
I checked the published CVEs. Not only am I unable to find any proof of your security flaw remark (at least upon inspecting CVEs from the past two years), but you just contradicted yourself on both claims you made earlier by acknowledging that the Open Office developers are fixing flaws found in their software.
This lobbying is having the opposite effect of what you intend, since the more I see it, the more my opinion of LibreOffice sinks.
I will not lose any sleep over failing to convince you. The information is there for all to see, which was my original intent. You can continue to use Openoffice to your heart's content; it makes no difference to me.
As for 'contradicting myself,' I did not. Unfixed security flaws exist in the code base, the project used to address them, and now no longer does. I also urge onlookers to investigate how Openoffice handles CVEs: the Apache foundation is a CVE Numbering Authority, they only issue CVEs after a release contains fixes, and they falsely claim to be the only CNA who can issue CVEs for Apache software projects. So, for the rest of the world, you don't get to find out about the flaws until the project gets around to fixing them, which is a wait increasing by the day.
I am a Google Docs user. I cited Open Office writer to make a price comparison since it is a more traditional word processor. You went on a tirade because I cited Open Office's word processor as an example of a free word processor instead of your favorite word processor. If you want to make damaging claims about a project to promote a competing project, you should have solid evidence first. Otherwise, it is just a smear campaign and hurts the project you recommend. It certainly has damaged LibreOffice in my eyes.
I didn't realize this was just an overreaction to someone failing to agree with you on the internet. This thread makes a lot more sense to me now. It doesn't change the facts, which I have presented and which I stand by.
Now this is projection. You have been spouting nonsense ever since I cited a word processor you did not like when talking about how the cost of word processors has dropped to 0. Being "triggered" by seeing someone not cite your favorite word processor is the height of absurdity, and you are doing no favors for the LibreOffice project by behaving like this.
I've found looking at commit counts is never very good for judging project activity, at least if they don't squash-merge all pulls. For example there can be pages of one liners
In retrospect it seems pretty wild that users were expected to actuate an explicit “save” command and that word processors didn’t just handle this automatically.
I’m sure there were real reasons - I was never involved in DOS or Windows programming but I presume it had to do with the slowness of saving to disk (and that a background auto-save wasn’t technically possible?). Or did we just not yet collectively have enough experience to know that auto saving was something critical to writers…?