From what I heard, the filesystem was very cool. You could attach arbitrary key-value pairs to files, and e.g. rather than store song metadata in ID3 tags or whatever, it was stored as filesystem metadata, making it searchable by any program without knowledge of a file's internals. As I recall reading, one could create a virtual folder that contained the results of a search, e.g. "all MP3 files where artist='Pink Floyd'" and use that as a playlist.
I have played around a bit with Haiku, but have not figured out how to do that so far.
I doubt it. With WordStar/WordPerfect, the original developers and vendors are no longer in the game.
If Microsoft did that, they would be admitting, basically, the last 20 years were mostly wasted on useless gadgets. Some users, of course, would argue that, yes, they were. But Microsoft's management and stockholders would not be happy about that.
Good thought. Familiarity and muscle memory are a big asset. As a long time emacs user, I feel the same about my tool of choice. It's not always about being the absolute best tool there is, but about being one that you know inside and out - you no longer need to spend a lot of time figuring out how to do something, you can just do it.
Copyright issues aside - which can be quite thorny for software this old - I imagine the people who created WordStar must take great pride in the fact that more than thirty years later, people still make good use of their creation.
Fourth years, it was first released in 1984. I had a CPM card for my Franklin clone that came with WordStar. I just used the standard Apple Writer, or whatever Franklin renamed it. At university starting in 1986 I just took my Apple ][ floppy and a 3.5 one formatted for Apple ][c & Mac and do a juggle the files over and typeset the papers using the Mac. So I never used WordStar.
I'm not a big fan of Windows, but I'm a bit sad that the project didn't go anywhere forever and then was cancelled. They had some pretty ambitious and interesting ideas for it.
E.g. the only public beta of Vista that had it enabled used the database as a backing store for Outlook contacts. Each contact was an object in the database. So were photos. And you could link - as I recall, I only read about it back then - people to photos. And then search on that data, of course. Like, "give me all emails, documents, and photos that have to do with person X, from 2022-2023".
But IIRC, the performance was atrocious. They might have been able to fix that, but instead it ended on the junk heap of unrealized ideas.
I remember those Longhorn betas - yes, it was coming apart under feature creep, but that only gave us more to play with and anticipate in the leaks.
A shame that MS is no longer in the mindset of ambition like this. Instead we get adverts and clickbait in the Start Menu, and the worst filesystem search on any OS I've experienced.
I feel like I need to inform you that the people doing the “recommendations” in the Windows start menu are not the same people who write filesystems.
The venn diagram of those two sets of people is two non-touching, non-intersecting circles.
There are interesting things going on, I’m sure, but we won’t see any of it until this AI baloney is behind us.
Nerds create a virtual moron that gets a large percentage of stuff wrong and execs demand that it be inserted into every product made immediately. An absolute genius move only an MBA can explain.
Sure, but that indicates institutional rot. If the people who write NTFS drivers (i.e. its devs who love Windows the most) can't push back on user hostility and short-sighted decisions are made constantly then we have a company that has drifted far from its strengths. It is just coasting on brand recognition. This is the kind of trend that is seldom reversed.
Diary from the late 1990s. The original timestamps haven't survived moving across machines repeatedly, of course, but the files are named after the date I wrote them.
I have played around a bit with Haiku, but have not figured out how to do that so far.