Spectre GCR, by Dave and Sandy Small, is the final version of a Mac emulator for Atari ST previously known as Magic Sac and Spectre 128. I link to its manual because the document is, as the title page says, "FUN TO READ", and
>WARNING: This manual is easy to read an actually entertaining. This may ruin your enjoyment of other computer manuals.
It also has drawings from the Smalls' small children.
As is noted in the article, selling band shirts was not yet common practice when the Ramones starting doing it. Until Napster came along tours were marketing for albums, which were the primary revenue source.
I seem to recall reading that Gary Holt or Jack Gibson, either from Exodus, claim that despite being known worldwide as a thrash metal act they have to support themselves selling t-shirts, since their earnings from touring, albums or streamings won't cover their expenses
It was likely all of them, but the more famous quote recently from Gary is, “People think, ‘Oh, you're a rich rock star.’ No. I sell shirts outta my fucking closet.”
It's not that they made more money from merchandise, it's that they sold more t-shirts than albums. Implying that more people were interested in the "image" of punk rock than the music.
I guess that's the definition of 'iconic' - many a time I have approached someone wearing a Ramones or Motörhead T-shirt trying to chat a bit, only to be told 'Sorry, don't know the music at all, but the shirt is cool...'
Although the article is unsure whether they sold more t-shirts than tickets, implying that people were interested in the music in a live capacity.
Which is a reasonable implication given that punk grew up around the DIY culture. A commercially produced recording doesn't exactly align with the interests of that type of community, even where that community enjoys the music itself.
I think WP was just too late to the party honestly by the time they got around to actually seriously considering/doing what they said they would do, there were already established good word processors on the ST.
WP did eventually come to the ST and if I recall it was panned as a horrible port. I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop?
Mine came with 1st Word Plus, and it was excellent for the time.
> I think there was talk of MS Word, too, and also a flop?
There was a port of MS Word, and it worked well. For some strange historical reasons I can't recall now, though, it was called and marketed as MS Write instead.
Write was the extremely basic free wordprocessor in Windows 3.x -- and so the name did the ST version a grave disservice.
>I think WP was just too late to the party honestly
Nothing with the power of WordPerfect.
Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known.
WordPerfect beat them all.
Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989.
My favourite was Protext (Arnor) which was an old school mostly keyboard-centric word processor, rather than anything like DTP. Crazy powerful. It was originally Amstrad CPC, but later released on Atari ST, MS-DOS, Amiga, Archimedes and even more bespoke hardware like the Amstrad NC.
It was certainly popular, but I hated all the function keys (I still hate function keys) and my favourite was WordStar (not for Windows), for both word processing and as a programming editor, up until I switched to Word and Windows vi clones.
I remember the CP/M version of WordStar gave you a patching tool that allowed you to insert screen and keyboard handlers in machine code, for your specific hardware (to speed things up), into the WS code. I can still remember how clever I thought I was when I got this to work!
Yes, the first ST version in 1987 had bugs. But WordPerfect fixed bugs for the next four years, and by 1988 was in good shape <https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n1/wordperfectst.html> despite, as I said, the huge problem with piracy (See, for example, the author of the 1987 review you cited writing at <https://archive.org/details/ST_Log_Magazine_Issue_21/page/n8...>. If the ST version were so useless why would he have bothered to appeal to the community?). As I said, the odds of a random no-name ST or Amiga word processor coming anywhere close to WordPerfect's power c. 1989 are zero.
Piracy always exists. The question is to what degree. On the PC the bulk of the market is business customers, where piracy is relatively minor compared to legitimate sales, and corporate customers have a lot of power when they complain to vendors; this is why copy protection more or less disappeared for PC business software after the mid-1980s, with Lotus being probably the last to comply by getting rid of the universally detested key-disk system. On the ST and Amiga the business market more or less didn't exist (no, musicians on ST, or small-town TV stations using Video Toaster for Amiga, aren't meaningful in number or percentage by comparison), so potential sales are limited by a) the far smaller size of the overall market and b) the far smaller percentage of customers within said smaller market paying for the product.
Hmm, just looked up WP on Wikipedia - I didn't realise it was ported around so much. Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good, which is not what you want for word processing. But it did have a nice mono display, for the time.
> Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good
The same rubber domes and plastic plungers were Totally Unacceptable on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ and QL, Not Very Good on the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, and just what everyone uses on PCs today.
More British Muslims joined ISIS than the British military. <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/magazine/her-majestys-jih...>