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Electric Solar Adventure
Playing old computer games is something a certain number of people do (although in my case, that could involve having been too stubborn to have ever bought the “right” computer to play the new games from any moment on). Trying out more recent programs that push what old computers were thought capable of gets some attention, too (although it keeps reminding me my own programming skills remain very limited). Something in between either option, namely exploring antique “productivity software,” appears to be more obscure. There do seem reasons for that. Trying out an “8-bit” word processor, spreadsheet, or other serious application gives an impression of being less fun than playing an “8-bit” game and less rewarding than programming an “8-bit” microprocessor. Every so often, though, I do poke away at an application or two with thoughts of trying to get a better sense of the more recent days of yore.
My thoughts had been turning towards a word processor from my own past, but kept getting distracted from that by attempts to “establish some groundwork first.” One of those attempts involved the awareness I have a TRS-80 disk image containing one of the very first word processor programs for general-purpose microcomputers, Electric Pencil. Trying to find the documentation that seems just about required to do much of anything with applications squeezed into minimal memory and offering no built-in guidance for their commands, I turned up a reminder Electric Pencil had predated the TRS-80 itself in not just the manual but the program itself for an earlier computer, the SOL-20. I knew a bit about that machine, which moved on from “miniature versions of what ‘computers’ were supposed to be, namely boxes with arrays of switches and lights on one side” to “futuristic typewriters without anywhere to roll the paper into” (even with its sides made of wood, specifically walnut, for a touch of 1970s class) but was still poised in between “kits you’d solder together yourself” and “machines you bought from a store.” Coaxing Electric Pencil into operation through TRS-80 emulation (to get it running on a real example of that computer involved hacking its hardware to wire in a dedicated “control” key), I kept thinking how the site that offered the manual also offered a SOL-20 emulator. At last, the thought of getting one more emulator working filled my mind.
To get that program running I used Wine via Crossover, even if that gets me thinking that one of these days I am going to get a new “Apple Silicon” computer, and at some point after that the ability to still translate “Intel code” could get taken out of the operating system just as the ability to still translate “PowerPC code” was taken out as a previous processor transition wrapped up. There is a different and more recent emulator, but it doesn’t have quite as many features, having been programmed to run on a Raspberry Pi inside a replica SOL-20 case, perhaps one of the largest and most elaborate Pi cases ever. In any case, once I had the around-for-years emulator started I tried it out with a game called “Target” I’d also known about before, then got straight to business by loading Electric Pencil through a feature amounting to “typing in all its hex code perfectly and instantly.” The title screen displayed a copyright date two years earlier than the one of the TRS-80 version.
From there I did have to sort out to start a new paragraph by hitting control-return rather than just return, corresponding to the “Line Feed” key on the SOL’s keyboard, that much smaller and a further reach than its own “Return.” I then had to keep reminding myself to move the cursor back to the start of the file if I wanted to save all of it to a “virtual tape file” (the TRS-80 version could use emulated disks). With the tape file saved I tried opening it with an “outside” text editor, then copied the hexadecimal numbers labelled as “data” into a hex editor to turn them back into text. At that point I did daydream about typing a first draft of this post in Electric Pencil itself. I’ve typed on typewriters that did have somewhere to roll the paper into, and can appreciate being able to correct typos. Every so often, though, I would run into garbage characters in the extracted text, and got to wondering if they marked where I’d deleted extra letters or switched into insert mode to make up for an old issue I’d seen identified and now experienced, namely that Electric Pencil could lose characters as its word wrap kicked in at the end of a line. I wound up typing following drafts in my regular text editors, conscious I’d experienced certain difficulties from the past without the full rewards of experience. The SOL’s keyboard does seem to have been quite excellent in feel; I knew one of those machines was in the offices of Creative Computing for years, and even the mechanical keyboard that was put in the replica case doesn’t quite seem to measure up. I also know, though, that part of that feel was due to foam-rubber pads that have flattened out and crumbled over the decades to require replacement in whatever machines people are lucky enough to now have.
My thoughts had been turning towards a word processor from my own past, but kept getting distracted from that by attempts to “establish some groundwork first.” One of those attempts involved the awareness I have a TRS-80 disk image containing one of the very first word processor programs for general-purpose microcomputers, Electric Pencil. Trying to find the documentation that seems just about required to do much of anything with applications squeezed into minimal memory and offering no built-in guidance for their commands, I turned up a reminder Electric Pencil had predated the TRS-80 itself in not just the manual but the program itself for an earlier computer, the SOL-20. I knew a bit about that machine, which moved on from “miniature versions of what ‘computers’ were supposed to be, namely boxes with arrays of switches and lights on one side” to “futuristic typewriters without anywhere to roll the paper into” (even with its sides made of wood, specifically walnut, for a touch of 1970s class) but was still poised in between “kits you’d solder together yourself” and “machines you bought from a store.” Coaxing Electric Pencil into operation through TRS-80 emulation (to get it running on a real example of that computer involved hacking its hardware to wire in a dedicated “control” key), I kept thinking how the site that offered the manual also offered a SOL-20 emulator. At last, the thought of getting one more emulator working filled my mind.
To get that program running I used Wine via Crossover, even if that gets me thinking that one of these days I am going to get a new “Apple Silicon” computer, and at some point after that the ability to still translate “Intel code” could get taken out of the operating system just as the ability to still translate “PowerPC code” was taken out as a previous processor transition wrapped up. There is a different and more recent emulator, but it doesn’t have quite as many features, having been programmed to run on a Raspberry Pi inside a replica SOL-20 case, perhaps one of the largest and most elaborate Pi cases ever. In any case, once I had the around-for-years emulator started I tried it out with a game called “Target” I’d also known about before, then got straight to business by loading Electric Pencil through a feature amounting to “typing in all its hex code perfectly and instantly.” The title screen displayed a copyright date two years earlier than the one of the TRS-80 version.
From there I did have to sort out to start a new paragraph by hitting control-return rather than just return, corresponding to the “Line Feed” key on the SOL’s keyboard, that much smaller and a further reach than its own “Return.” I then had to keep reminding myself to move the cursor back to the start of the file if I wanted to save all of it to a “virtual tape file” (the TRS-80 version could use emulated disks). With the tape file saved I tried opening it with an “outside” text editor, then copied the hexadecimal numbers labelled as “data” into a hex editor to turn them back into text. At that point I did daydream about typing a first draft of this post in Electric Pencil itself. I’ve typed on typewriters that did have somewhere to roll the paper into, and can appreciate being able to correct typos. Every so often, though, I would run into garbage characters in the extracted text, and got to wondering if they marked where I’d deleted extra letters or switched into insert mode to make up for an old issue I’d seen identified and now experienced, namely that Electric Pencil could lose characters as its word wrap kicked in at the end of a line. I wound up typing following drafts in my regular text editors, conscious I’d experienced certain difficulties from the past without the full rewards of experience. The SOL’s keyboard does seem to have been quite excellent in feel; I knew one of those machines was in the offices of Creative Computing for years, and even the mechanical keyboard that was put in the replica case doesn’t quite seem to measure up. I also know, though, that part of that feel was due to foam-rubber pads that have flattened out and crumbled over the decades to require replacement in whatever machines people are lucky enough to now have.