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From: walton@tybalt.caltech.edu (Steve Walton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Old Software (Was: SONIX)
Message-ID: <2598@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: Wed, 6-May-87 15:23:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: cit-vax.2598
Posted: Wed May  6 15:23:28 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 9-May-87 01:03:54 EDT
References: <2990@well.UUCP> <1834@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP>
Sender: news@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu
Reply-To: walton@tybalt.caltech.edu (Steve Walton)
Distribution: world
Organization: Calfornia Institute of Technology
Lines: 40
Summary: Give me WYSIWIG or give me TeX

In article <1834@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP> daveh@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (Dave Haynie) writes:
>
>in article <2990@well.UUCP>, ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) says:
>
>> FLAME_ON
>> 
>> 	The lack of decent music software for the Amiga is inexcusable.  I
>> have here a program for my poor old 2MHz 8080-based SOL-20 that does
>> three-voice music, and is more powerful than many currently available music
>> programs for nearly all machines. ....
>
>Let's take another area, Word Processing, for example.  I've used markup
>style languages on a mainframe and several minis, and any one of these
>word processing languages (Scribe on a DEC-20, nroff on various PDP-11 and
>VAXen) does so much more for me than the current crop of WYSIWYG word
>processors.  I used Scribe for several large papers, way back from '79
>through '83 (college).  It would structure my document at various levels
>automatically...[etc]

I think Dave and Leo are talking about two entirely different things
here.  Leo's point was that better music programs than the current
Amiga crop exist for much smaller and less powerful machines, on which
we are all agreed.  However...SCRIBE, nroff, TeX, et. al. are HUGE
programs, and running them on the Amiga is nearly impossible.  A
friend of mine has Amiga TeX for example.  Very nice package, but to
make it useful you almost must have a hard disk and an extra couple of
MB of memory; the distribution takes up 4 floppies and doesn't include
many fonts which I use in day-to-day work. A quick "size" command on
4.3BSD's nroff shows it to be 700 KB long.  And none of these are
WYSIWIG in any sense (though AmigaTeX's previewer is close); they are
more like extremely obscure programming languages for commanding
printers to produce output. 
     Granted, more powerful formatting would be nice.  But we don't
have to give up WYSIWIG for it--just look at MicroSoft Word.  I'd
gladly pay $250 for an Amiga version (that's what the Mac one lists
for).  We certainly shouldn't cripple our wonderful graphics engine
formatters with from text-only computers which are too big anyway.
    Steve Walton, guest as walton@tybalt.caltech.edu
    AMETEK Computer Research Division, ametek!walton@csvax.caltech.edu
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