Re: Maintenance Spread***?

On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 22:17:43 -0700, The Real Bev wrote:

> "Mike W." wrote:
>>
>> The Real Bev <bashley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> >> Actually, the first few things I did on a spread*** were done on
>> >> Visicalc.
>> >
>> >Likewise, but on a TRS-80. A real, legitimate BOUGHT copy, too. Then came
>> >Supercalc under CP/M and MSDOS. I think I bought that one too...
>>
>> That makes you the second person I know that bought that stuff.... remember
>> the old attempts at copy protection with bad sectors and such?
>
> Not specifically, but it seems like you could always hunt around and find
> somebody who had a way to defeat them. I think we had some kind of hardware
> thingy that would do that, but I don't remember wanting anything that had copy
> protection. This was before we had net access, so I wonder how we found out
> about that stuff...

The friend of a friend of a friend network along with Sneakernet. I ran a
Radioshack Color Computer 2 at the time (mid '80s) and I had "friends"
giving me all sorts of software--some of it even worked! The good thing
about those days is that viruses were non-existant especially on a Coco.

About the time I moved to an MS-DOS machine ('89) I had a good friend that
ordered all kinds of shareware from a company called Best Bits 'n Bytes.
They'd send out a largish catalog with updates about quarterly, I think.
It was a great resource before the 'Net was accessable.

> I used dBaseII, *Calc, Wordstar and its improved
> other-side-of-the-blanket clones, and eventually Word Perfect. I may have
> bought legit copies at yard sales because I just threw away a lot of original
> diskettes. Made me sick to toss Ventura Publisher, but it's worthless and
> useless now.

On the Coco I used a suite that I can't remember the name of. I ended up
using the word processor the most and tried to figure out the spread***,
but it was lost on me at the time.

Right now the best office suite in terms of being able to read old file
formats is Open Office ( http://www.openoffice.org ). Version 2 is just
about to be released and it looks very good. I use its spread*** (Calc)
for various tasks and am looking forward to implementing its database
program--something I've wanted to do back in the Coco days, but I suck as
a prorammer. I've used Impress (Powerpoint equivalent) to design my ham
radio QSL cards and it's worked well.

All things considered, the good old days were fun, but I much prefer
today's hardware and software.

- Nate >>

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds,
the pessimist fears this is true."

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