:) Before I read the link, I was thinking about a text editor I would keep on my rescue floppy disks. The method of distribution was typing the assembly out of the November 15, 1988 edition of PC Magazine.
It was an impromptu instruction manual for an Apple ][ paint program that everyone was pirating at the time. I guess it made it's rounds around the BBS circuit and was captured in the textfiles.com archive.
When I was really young, I opened a few .exe files in Notepad to try to figure out how they were created. I remember at one point seeing all of the garbage character output and thought, "wow, someone wrote and understands all of this?"
I loved XyWrite back in the day (mid 80's). I used it for everyday word processing, but once also used it to format a several hundred page film catalog. Our school district was having the catalogs typeset every year for thousands of dollars. I bought a Ricoh laser printer (about $5K at the time!) and used XyWrite on a 640K DOS computer to format the catalog just like the typesetter, printed it on the laser, and paid for my laser printer.
The data for the catalog came from a Realia Cobol indexed sequential file and a Cobol program read that and wrote a text file containing the data with XyWrite commands. It took hours for XyWrite to format the file into PostScript on an 8MHz PC-AT clone, but it didn't choke, even on a document of hundreds of pages, and did it all in 640K of RAM. Some talented people worked on XyWrite.
In the early 80's I was doing my computing 'A' levels at a technical college. I used to type my programs on one of those old-fashioned teletypes, which I think were a cast-off from a regional polytechnic. I think the computers did have keyboards, but there were only 3 of them, and competition was tight. So I used a teletype. Making a "backup" consisted of printing the program out to paper tape.
I kept the rolls of paper tape and occasionally used them as streamers, much to the curiosity of neighbours.
Writing a few, not installing. I was still in hardware development, with a bit of software exposure. Using a shortcut to represent and calculate dates at the time was the norm.
High school, ca. 1994. I had written a history paper in TeX (just plain TeX, not LaTeX) and somehow the PostScript file (we didn’t have PDF then) I had generated at home got slightly corrupted on the floppy and wouldn’t print correctly on the HP LaserJet in the school computer lab. Somehow, I opened the .ps file in EDIT on MS-DOS and was able to fix the file to the point where it printed.
"we used to write code by typing it directly onto the screen"
I once knew a guy who had programmed by drilling holes in leather with a hand drill. :-)
[Some ancient process control mainframe that booted originally from a paper tape - over the decades of use in a steel mill the paper tape had long since worn out and been replaced by a sturdy leather belt - he had to modify the boot code, hence the drill]
When I got started w/ PCs in the late 80s I wrote a GW-BASIC program to take keypresses (one of those 'IF INKEY$<>""' type programs) and write each keypress out to my Okidata dot matrix printer a character at a time. Pressing keys made a physical thing move. That's always fun.
It particularly interesting to send control codes to see what they made the printer do. Pressing <ENTER> got carriage returns without advancing the platen (so you could type over and over again on the same line). <CTRL><L> made the printer advance to the next page of the fan fold. <CTRL><G> made the printer beep.
I figured out that <CTRL><H> moved the print head backward. I used this to make some "impossible to print" output (that is, impossible for my word processor to reproduce because it wouldn't send backspaces for the purposes of over-printing).
Later, during my youthful phase of probing systems on various networks, I ran into systems that, upon entry of a bad password, would send a series of backspaces, various random letters, pound signs, and asterisks before giving a new logon prompt. At the time I didn't put two and two together. (I hadn't yet read Levy's "Hackers" and the idea of using a teletype as an input device on a computer wasn't a thing I'd heard about yet.)
Years later, looking at old captures and seeing this seemingly strange series of characters, I realized what the purpose was. The characters were being sent to obliterate the password printed by your teletype's local echo.
(I want to say the OS was PRIMOS but I don't remember for sure. I saw a number of them on either Tymnet or Telenet-- maybe both.)
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