1/ I have a story about WordStar from the mid-80s. I was in high school, and was blown away by it. Not just because it was fast, light, and good, but also because my BASIC brain *could not figure how to represent the data in a word processor*. I was OBSESSED about this. ↵
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/06/wordstar_7_the_last_ever/
2/ Hope came from an unexpected quarter. My school bought 2-3 machines from a local company. The machines had almost nothing: like CP/M, a BASIC interpreter, and…their rudimentary clone of WordStar! Someone working a few blocks from my school had written a word processor!!! ↵
3/ Now, how was I going to get them to talk to me? Here, it helped that they were alums, and it was the kind of school (SJBHS in BLR) whose alums were called Old Boys, if you catch my drift. So I wangled an invite to their offices. They were very nice. ↵
4/ I finally popped the big question: in effect, how do you represent the data in a word processor? I didn't know big-O or anything, but I had big-O intuitions that told me it couldn't possibly be any of the BASIC representations I could come up with. ↵
5/ Frustratingly, they just kinda' clammed up, going into "trade secret" mode, like I was competition. I knew it couldn't have been written in BASIC, but they wouldn't even tell me whether they'd written it in Pascal or Assembly (the only other things that seemed plausible). ↵
6/ Many months later, I had learned to read DOS's .COM format. A dumb-ass prank we'd play was to take a binary and change all the strings to something else that was no longer than the original. And then, from somewhere deep in my consciousness came an idea. ↵
7/ I went to school and spent some time working through everything in that clone word processor. Then I edited the actual WordStar binary. And … it was a perfect match. I showed my friends "my" WordBlah (whatever it was called). ↵
8/ And that's how the penny dropped: why they hadn't been willing to answer any questions, tell me which language, give me any sense of how to store the strings—anything else. They just let me believe they'd written it, and its trade secrets were just too great to divulge. •
@sree Same energy.
@mason That's funny, and very much the opposite, so the very honorable version.
@shriramk They literally pirated it? Jeeeeez...
@tealeg To be fair, all the software I grew up around in India was pirated, because nobody could afford a license for anything. But at least we didn't change the names and call them our own!
@tealeg @mason I've been meaning to post about this…
One of the FSF board members (whom I know well) sent me a 35th anniversary of FSF celebration t-shirt.
Young me would have been over the moon at even knowing someone that highly-placed at FSF.
But current me doesn't wear it.
I dread, e.g., wearing it to class, someone asking "Wait, is the FSF that org…" and me having to say "yeah" and (implicitly) justify why I'm then wearing their t-shirt.