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Word processors on the VIC-20 [1]
['Rob Beschizza']
Date: 2025-01-09
What I love most about Lawrence Woodman's retrospective of Commodore VIC-20 word processors is how inappropriate its wide-pixel, low-res display is for that task. And yet he perservered!
Commodore's VICWRITER has an interesting approach to dealing with the 22 character width of the Vic. It creates a display like a typewriter where the page moves as if on a carriage about the central typeface area. The line width ruler is displayed below this. This actually works quite well and allows us to quite comfortably type as if using a typewriter but with the benefit that we can easily move around the page to edit what we have written.
The VIC-20 is somewhat obscured in the history of computers because it was quickly superceded by the Commodore 64 and other more capable 8-bits—but it was a big success, outselling the Apple II for a year or two. If anyone ever wrote a novel on one, get in touch.
Previously:
• Famed DOS-era word processor WordStar 7 made available for modern machines
• The novelty effect: how switching to a different word processor can improve your writing
• I wrote this review of a Freewrite on a Freewrite
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