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   Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 09-Aug-2024 21:54:15 JST Shriram Krishnamurthi

   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/

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     Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 09-Aug-2024 21:53:59 JST Shriram Krishnamurthi

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     • The ol' tealeg 🐡

     @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!

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     The ol' tealeg 🐡 (tealeg@mastodon.online)'s status on Friday, 09-Aug-2024 21:54:00 JST The ol' tealeg 🐡

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     @shriramk They literally pirated it? Jeeeeez...

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 09-Aug-2024 21:54:03 JST Shriram Krishnamurthi

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     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. ↵

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     Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 09-Aug-2024 21:54:03 JST Shriram Krishnamurthi

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     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). ↵

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     Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 09-Aug-2024 21:54:03 JST Shriram Krishnamurthi

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     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. •

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     Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 09-Aug-2024 21:54:06 JST Shriram Krishnamurthi

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     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). ↵

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     Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 09-Aug-2024 21:54:07 JST Shriram Krishnamurthi

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     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. ↵

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     Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 09-Aug-2024 21:54:11 JST Shriram Krishnamurthi

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     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. ↵

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     Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 09-Aug-2024 21:54:12 JST Shriram Krishnamurthi

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     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!!! ↵