CompuServe Messages

#Humor

    03-Mar-93 04:38:23
Sb: #41642-#Humor
Fm: Jack L. Chalker 72205,613
To: Wick Smith 70701,315
Sprint is a now-moribund DOS-based word processor marketed/sold by Borland International. It is based upon FinalWord, which in turn was based upon a marriage of the minicomputer editor EMACS and the Unix formatter Scribe. It is, as I said, DOS-based and screen ugly, but has exceptional configurability (you can essentially remap it so it becomes personalized–90% of the files are open and designed to be modified), better PostScript support than anything in Windows to date, has disk-limited virtual memory so your files can be almost any size, allows up to 24 files to be open and remain open at once, and includes automatic state save in which a compressed copy of everything in memory is written to a separate disk file any time your hands leave the keyboard so that even if you pull the plug or get a severe power outage you can recover all your work even if unsaved. Many of its features are unduplicated by any word processor past or present in any OS environment. Borland still uses it internally and sells it, but stopped development on future versions when it realized that it was never going to overtake WordPerfect. It retains a very loyal following and because of its essentially open architecture a lot of bright programmers have continued to upgrade and improve and add features to it even though Borland does not. Quite a number of professional writers still use it. That explain things?