Hey all...
I am a noob to the Sinclairverse and I asked around a little in the Timexverse, and I was kinda surprised that someone who could tell me how to take apart a TS1000 and put it back together in their sleep, loves discussing the hardware and it's history... went silent and scratched their head when I asked them about what people used as a word processor to save simple text files on a ZX81/TS1000...? Presumably, once the 16K was available, people would have wanted to use the thing to save text, I would think.... I know I want to, LOL! So my authority seemed never to have considered using the device as a word processor, and I know that early home microcomputers were not necessarily perceived as tools for documenting simple words... So I do not know if young kids in the UK ever used the thing to type stuff for school, for example, I mean why would they if they could not print in standard A4 format to submit something? I remember all of the "advanced tech typewriters" of the era too... but those would have been expensive, so I am guessing that high school students did not type stuff in secondary school, and I don't remember at what point in the 80's I had to begin typing essays and papers, but I know it was junior or senior year, (so like 88-91, yeah, I'm young.) but I know also that I used a typewriter that my mom used for work, and it was not digital with editing, etc. I had white out. It would never have even occurred to me to try to do my homework on our Atari 400, which was used strictly for games, of which we only ever had a few, and we had no printer, anyhow. It was really a waste of space, LMAO. We simply weren't "computer people"
Anyhow, I am seeking a text editor or method for ZX81, if anyone has info, and would love any feedback about the "historical" question regarding whether or not the ZX81 was used at all for school/office work. I am assuming not really.
Kind Regards, Paul
Word Processor/Text Editor?
Re: Word Processor/Text Editor?
People may have used Tasword with their ZXPrinter or Alplhacom32.
You could also use LText which gave you lowercase letters.
There was also Word Sinc II, which would give you lowercase and more than 32 letters per line with a more narrower font.
If you were professional, there was Memotext which needed extra hardware. First Memotext was inside an hardware cartridge, and you needed Memopak Centronics or Serial Interface to connect a parallel or serial printer. Now you had full 80 column text output.
People didn't use software to save text files, as that is a complicated thing on a ZX81. On a ZX81 you cannot save data files, so you can only update your memory, and save the whole program again, now containing the data you want to save.
You could also use LText which gave you lowercase letters.
There was also Word Sinc II, which would give you lowercase and more than 32 letters per line with a more narrower font.
If you were professional, there was Memotext which needed extra hardware. First Memotext was inside an hardware cartridge, and you needed Memopak Centronics or Serial Interface to connect a parallel or serial printer. Now you had full 80 column text output.
People didn't use software to save text files, as that is a complicated thing on a ZX81. On a ZX81 you cannot save data files, so you can only update your memory, and save the whole program again, now containing the data you want to save.
Re: Word Processor/Text Editor?
Thanks Martin!
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1024MAK
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Re: Word Processor/Text Editor?
To answer some of you questions. As Martin has already said, Tasword was reasonably popular. And when the ZX Spectrum cane out, a much improved version of Tasword was developed and released.
During the time of the ZX81, even 9 pin dot matrix printers were very expensive compared to the cost of a ZX81. Never mind the expensive daisy wheel type that was needed for business quality letters.
This was still the case when the ZX Spectrum was released. For both the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum, if you wanted to use a “proper” printer, you also had to buy a parallel printer interface.
At my school in 1983, my school had a total of two BBC B machines (each with a disk drive( and a single Research Machines 380Z. I think there was a single 9 pin dot matrix printer.
Because “proper” printers were so expensive, the cheap Sinclair ZX Printer was reasonably popular. Next up, at a higher price was the Alplhacom32 thermal paper printer.
In the early 1980s, unless you had something like a BBC B or a “business machine” (CP/M or an even more expensive 8088/8086 based PC), word processing was not really considered practical at home. Hence the large number of electronic typewriters that were available.
Later on, after Sinclair released the Interface 1 for the ZX Spectrum, things started to slowly change. But for the ZX81, given the limitations, you really needed to improve it (mechanical keyboard, RAM pack, parallel printer interface), even then, word processing was a niche thing.
For me, I didn’t really start using word processing software until I got an Atari STFM. But that was sometime in the late 1980s (1986 I think).
Mark
During the time of the ZX81, even 9 pin dot matrix printers were very expensive compared to the cost of a ZX81. Never mind the expensive daisy wheel type that was needed for business quality letters.
This was still the case when the ZX Spectrum was released. For both the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum, if you wanted to use a “proper” printer, you also had to buy a parallel printer interface.
At my school in 1983, my school had a total of two BBC B machines (each with a disk drive( and a single Research Machines 380Z. I think there was a single 9 pin dot matrix printer.
Because “proper” printers were so expensive, the cheap Sinclair ZX Printer was reasonably popular. Next up, at a higher price was the Alplhacom32 thermal paper printer.
In the early 1980s, unless you had something like a BBC B or a “business machine” (CP/M or an even more expensive 8088/8086 based PC), word processing was not really considered practical at home. Hence the large number of electronic typewriters that were available.
Later on, after Sinclair released the Interface 1 for the ZX Spectrum, things started to slowly change. But for the ZX81, given the limitations, you really needed to improve it (mechanical keyboard, RAM pack, parallel printer interface), even then, word processing was a niche thing.
For me, I didn’t really start using word processing software until I got an Atari STFM. But that was sometime in the late 1980s (1986 I think).
Mark
ZX81 Variations
ZX81 Chip Pin-outs
ZX81 Video Transistor Buffer Amp
Standby alert
There are four lights!
Step up to red alert. Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb
Looking forward to summer later in the year.
ZX81 Chip Pin-outs
ZX81 Video Transistor Buffer Amp
Standby alert There are four lights!
Step up to red alert. Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb
Looking forward to summer later in the year.
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Journeyman
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Re: Word Processor/Text Editor?
Oddly enough, I stumbled across this thread after playing around with Tasword on my ZX81 last night. I actually got the Zeddy out for some 3D Monster Maze, but after I'd been eaten a few times, I had a look through the memory card on my ZXPand to see what else I'd put on it. I fired up Tasword, was impressed by how good it is for such a limited computer, and ended up typing a letter to a friend which I printed (ALL CAPS, of course) on my Alphacom 32!
Of course, the results were far from professional, so it wasn't something you could use for serious business projects or anything, but it did actually work. Tasword for the ZX81 is surprisingly full-featured, and can store about 9.5K of text. By the time you've typed that much on the crappy keyboard, you'll be losing your sanity anyway.
As others have mentioned, the ZX81 had some very, very serious limitations for any kind of text processing. The inability to save data outside the program you created it in was a very serious problem as it effectively held your work captive. Without RS232, you couldn't export anything to another machine either, and on top of that, of course, the ZX81 didn't support lower case and was missing a LOT of punctuation, so anything you could create on a stock machine was very limited. The character set didn't even remotely resemble ASCII, just to make things more complicated still.
The Spectrum overcame quite a few of these problems, especially if you had an Interface 1 and/or Centronics interface. It did seem to me though that very few Spectrum owners back in the day had this extra hardware. When I first owned one in my teens, I had Tasword Two and had fun playing with it, but I could only save files onto tape and I had no means of printing anything as I couldn't afford a printer. It did seem that because the Spectrum was very much a budget machine, most people didn't have Microdrives, disk drives or printers, whereas most of the people I knew who owned BBC Micros had at least a disk drive, and often a printer at home as well.
More recently, I've been able to afford all the stuff that was out of reach when I was a kid, and my Speccy can produce quite smart looking documents that I've used for business purposes in the 2020s! The 128K versions of Tasword have a lot of decent features, can store 64K of text, and are highly configurable for Microdrives, additional fonts, printer interfaces etc.
As for the humble ZX81, a real gamechanger is the ZXPand interface, which provides reliable saving on SD cards, and extends ZX81 BASIC to allow saving of blocks of memory in a very similar way to that provided on the Spectrum. When I first got mine, I did a bit of experimenting and came up with a BASIC program that takes input from the keyboard, converts it to ASCII and saves it on the SD card as a .TXT file that will open in Notepad on a PC. It's pretty crude as it only accepts input through an INPUT statement. Once that's entered, it uses a bunch of IF statements to identify characters one at a time, before poking memory addresses with the ASCII codes. It treats normal video characters as lower case and inverse video as upper case. It literally takes hours to translate a few lines, but I was amazed at how easy it was to do, and it was pretty cool seeing it work.
If I had the ability, I'd hack Tasword so it could translate and export text that way, but it's seriously out of my league to attempt that. The ZX81 doesn't support streams and channels in the way the Spectrum does, so it's not immediately obvious how you'd divert text from the printer to some other form of output. I'm guessing it must be possible, though.
Of course, the results were far from professional, so it wasn't something you could use for serious business projects or anything, but it did actually work. Tasword for the ZX81 is surprisingly full-featured, and can store about 9.5K of text. By the time you've typed that much on the crappy keyboard, you'll be losing your sanity anyway.
As others have mentioned, the ZX81 had some very, very serious limitations for any kind of text processing. The inability to save data outside the program you created it in was a very serious problem as it effectively held your work captive. Without RS232, you couldn't export anything to another machine either, and on top of that, of course, the ZX81 didn't support lower case and was missing a LOT of punctuation, so anything you could create on a stock machine was very limited. The character set didn't even remotely resemble ASCII, just to make things more complicated still.
The Spectrum overcame quite a few of these problems, especially if you had an Interface 1 and/or Centronics interface. It did seem to me though that very few Spectrum owners back in the day had this extra hardware. When I first owned one in my teens, I had Tasword Two and had fun playing with it, but I could only save files onto tape and I had no means of printing anything as I couldn't afford a printer. It did seem that because the Spectrum was very much a budget machine, most people didn't have Microdrives, disk drives or printers, whereas most of the people I knew who owned BBC Micros had at least a disk drive, and often a printer at home as well.
More recently, I've been able to afford all the stuff that was out of reach when I was a kid, and my Speccy can produce quite smart looking documents that I've used for business purposes in the 2020s! The 128K versions of Tasword have a lot of decent features, can store 64K of text, and are highly configurable for Microdrives, additional fonts, printer interfaces etc.
As for the humble ZX81, a real gamechanger is the ZXPand interface, which provides reliable saving on SD cards, and extends ZX81 BASIC to allow saving of blocks of memory in a very similar way to that provided on the Spectrum. When I first got mine, I did a bit of experimenting and came up with a BASIC program that takes input from the keyboard, converts it to ASCII and saves it on the SD card as a .TXT file that will open in Notepad on a PC. It's pretty crude as it only accepts input through an INPUT statement. Once that's entered, it uses a bunch of IF statements to identify characters one at a time, before poking memory addresses with the ASCII codes. It treats normal video characters as lower case and inverse video as upper case. It literally takes hours to translate a few lines, but I was amazed at how easy it was to do, and it was pretty cool seeing it work.
If I had the ability, I'd hack Tasword so it could translate and export text that way, but it's seriously out of my league to attempt that. The ZX81 doesn't support streams and channels in the way the Spectrum does, so it's not immediately obvious how you'd divert text from the printer to some other form of output. I'm guessing it must be possible, though.
Re: Word Processor/Text Editor?
Welcome to our forum Journeyman and an interesting first post.
You may or not be aware that there is a file handling program for the ZXpand called ZXpand commander. This was written in the main by SirMorris, Kelly Abrantes Murta, Krystian Wlosek.
One novel feature it possesses is the ability to read plain TXT files in upper and lower case.
I have attached the package containing all you need to know to use it. In the package you will find a file titled cmdr.P, put this in the cards root folder. This is the file that runs commander. If you want this to be self running at boot up then rename it to MENU.P. to initialise self running enter the spands CONFIG command like so.. CONFIG " C=7F" if you don't like self running then CONFIG "C=FF" returns the spand to default and the program has to be initialised manually. Use shifted G for the CONFIG command.
The READ ME file in the package can be read by the spand, again just place it in the root of the card for ease of use or any other folder then navigate to it as per the manual.
The spand will self load and or run any program titled MENU once configured , in this case the zxpand commander program.
If you search the forum you will find the odd topic or two concerning its use.
Have fun!
You may or not be aware that there is a file handling program for the ZXpand called ZXpand commander. This was written in the main by SirMorris, Kelly Abrantes Murta, Krystian Wlosek.
One novel feature it possesses is the ability to read plain TXT files in upper and lower case.
I have attached the package containing all you need to know to use it. In the package you will find a file titled cmdr.P, put this in the cards root folder. This is the file that runs commander. If you want this to be self running at boot up then rename it to MENU.P. to initialise self running enter the spands CONFIG command like so.. CONFIG " C=7F" if you don't like self running then CONFIG "C=FF" returns the spand to default and the program has to be initialised manually. Use shifted G for the CONFIG command.
The READ ME file in the package can be read by the spand, again just place it in the root of the card for ease of use or any other folder then navigate to it as per the manual.
The spand will self load and or run any program titled MENU once configured , in this case the zxpand commander program.
If you search the forum you will find the odd topic or two concerning its use.
Have fun!
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Journeyman
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Re: Word Processor/Text Editor?
Ooh, thank you for the pointer! I'd not heard of that before, it looks pretty cool. I'll give it a play once I've updated my ZXPand. This is something I've never done in the long time I've owned it, it's still on version 1.3.
Appreciate the welcome. I tend to use my Spectrum rather more than my ZX81 so I'm active under the same username on a couple of more Speccy-related forums. I've got a Z88 as well. I do want to see what I can do with the ZX81, though, it's been gathering dust for a while and sometimes the capability of the little thing really amazes me. It also amazes me that it still works. I'll admit I haven't treated it with a huge amount of care.
Appreciate the welcome. I tend to use my Spectrum rather more than my ZX81 so I'm active under the same username on a couple of more Speccy-related forums. I've got a Z88 as well. I do want to see what I can do with the ZX81, though, it's been gathering dust for a while and sometimes the capability of the little thing really amazes me. It also amazes me that it still works. I'll admit I haven't treated it with a huge amount of care.
Re: Word Processor/Text Editor?
There is quite a bit that can be done with the little wedge these days and thanks to the spand we have a MIDI file player and now decent audio and by that I don't mean squeaky buzzy grunts, but audio in the sense of tracks/albums streamed from the card at a reasonable rate and quality. I have about 500 tracks on my card that I listen to nightly. If you're handy with a soldering iron and the thought of soldering sixteen resistors to a bit of Vero board doesn't hold any terrors for you and might be interested then I'll happily PM the details to you.
Re: Word Processor/Text Editor?
Sounds like the Microsoft Sound System or the parallel port “sound card” I had for my 286 back in the day. I was able to listen to 4 channel SoundTracker files in DOS.
Re: Word Processor/Text Editor?
I seem to remember,although I never tried it, that a simple resistor type 8-bit "ladder DAC" could be used on the parallel port of early pc's which converted the data from a RAW file into usable audio, much like the principle now used for the 81.