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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. ↵
theregister.com/2024/08/06/wor

The Register · WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for freeBy Liam Proven

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. ↵

Shriram Krishnamurthi

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. •

@shriramk Reminds me of the email server people peddled to my college which lived on an unreadable partition for "copy protection".

Took me a few minutes to figure out that it was ext with its magic number changed :)
@shriramk That reminds me of an early experience. I'd written a game for the Mac, in C, and I got a student job based in part on it. I learned some years later that they thought I hadn't written it because I had no clue how ClipRects worked. I pointed out to the fellow who told me this that the game had a single window and no need for ClipRects, and that I'd used one of the essential Mac tutorial programs to understand the basics of event handling. Sort of the opposite situation, I guess, but it reminded me of it. (MacDrone, if anyone wants to sleuth it up. It has a funny backstory all by itself that I might post sometime.)

@mason That's funny, and very much the opposite, so the very honorable version.

@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!

@shriramk @tealeg I remember the years before free software was common, when I was young and broke, I used to get various catalogs. One of them was "Programmer's Paradise" and they listed things like compilers and editors. I used to read over the descriptions with yearning. No way I could afford the stuff and I didn't have connections to pirate software even if I wanted to. I don't remember how I managed to afford LightspeedC or the first (and most critical) volume of Inside Mac that documented the Toolbox. Being a young computer geek before free software was so prevalent puts me in a position to deeply appreciate its transformative power. (That I managed to have a Mac SE was itself incredible good luck, even with no hard drive. TI 99/4a -> secondhand Osborne 1 Portable -> Mac SE.)

@mason @shriramk yes - the Free Software Foundation made a lot of sense to me when I was young. I even joined the FSF. I left in my 30s, because I didn't like some behaviors of individuals.

F/L/OSS has leveled the playing field greatly.

@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.

@shriramk @tealeg I still mostly support them, although whether I renew my membership each year is always something I think hard about. I was more aligned during the 90s when they were primarily concerned with making more new free software. My big break was the Nintendo bricks campaign, which felt like environmental damage for no good purpose, and the ongoing "my way or the highway" advocacy of GPL'd free software over other free software is wrongheaded, IMHO. So I'm a somewhat more liberal free software zealot than the standard GNU supporter. (I've been using CC0 for my own stuff lately.)

@mason @tealeg I do my best to stay out of OSS debates, but from what I can tell FSF has mostly become a bunch of irrelevant scolds. I don't know what they actually contribute any longer. Movements often totally outgrow their founders, and that's okay.

@shriramk @tealeg There's still a bunch of active maintainership and development coming out of GNU people, and the FSF provides resources to GNU. Given how corporations and corporate people try to drive free software projects, I don't want to see any sources of funding and infrastructure vanish if we can help it.

@mason @shriramk yes, it's important to remember that GNU projects are full of folks, including their leaders who don't necessarily align with the leadership of the FSF.