Wordwise

Wordwise is a word processor program. It was the best selling word processor in the UK for the BBC Microcomputer during the 1980-1990 time period (~50,000 copies sold as of Jan 1985).^[1] The program was supplied on an 8K ROM, and was published by Computer Concepts.^[2] The use of ROM allowed the entire RAM of the host machine to be used for storing and manipulating the text, and providing printer-buffer functionality.

Features

The program was not a WYSIWYG text editor. Printer codes, controlling the formatting of the text when printed, had to be defined via the OC command,^[3][4] followed by the exact string of Escape-sequence characters for the specific printer that you were using, to enable Bold, Italic, line-length, font-pitch, font size etc.^[5]

Many companies such as Watford Electronics provided utility-ROMS that allowed customers to use 'macro-commands' to call pre-programmed escape-sequences for their printers, vs. having to memorize / refer to cheat-sheets every time they wished to enable a font-change.

The program offered a rudimentary Print-preview mode, using the 80-column 'Mode 3' mode on the BBC Model B (ordinary text editing used the 'Mode 7' 40-column mode). However, this print preview mode could not display printer-specific effects such as Bold, underlining or Italic. (The BBC computer did not support the display of these font effects on-screen)

Expansion hardware (paged RAM) tools were also manufactured by companies such as Watford Electronics, to enable larger printer-buffers, and print-previewing of large documents in the 80-column screen modes.

More complete WYSIWYG functionality was only introduced later (again, subject to the same limitations of the font-display on the BBC), with the company's 'Inter Word' ROM in 1986. Due to these limitations, from an end user experience perspective, Wordwise was often thought of as not being as advanced as the competing 'View' word processor from Acornsoft.

Wordwise menu:

         WORDWISE
(C) Computer Concepts 1982

1) Save entire text
2) Load new text
3) Save marked text
4) Load text to cursor
5) Search and Replace
6) Print text
7) Preview text
8) Spool test

ESC Edit Mode

Please enter choice_

Wordwise Plus

The program was upgraded in 1984 with the introduction of 'Wordwise Plus', on a 16K ROM. This introduced new features such as 'contiguous files', which used the entire space on an attached disk-drive as virtual memory. (The original Wordwise program limited the document size to 27K - the amount of usable RAM on a 32K BBC Micro Model B), up to 11 documents in memory simultaneously (1x main text document, and 10x 'Segments'), and a Macro-programming language, along with compatibility with the 6502 Second Processor.

Wordwise Plus features

Wordwise Plus main menu:

       WORDWISE-PLUS
(C) Computer Concepts 1984

1) Save entire text
2) Load new text
3) Save marked text
4) Load text to cursor
5) Search and Replace
6) Print text
7) Preview text
8) Spool test
9) Segment menu

ESC Edit Mode

Please enter choice_

Version history

The program was upgraded multiple times during the lifetime of the product, as listed below:

Main ROMs - Computer Concepts

1982 - Wordwise

Wordwise-1.10

Wordwise-1.17

Wordwise-1.20

1985 - Wordwise Plus

WordwisePlus-1.48

WordwisePlus-1.49

WordwisePlus-1.4A

WordwisePlus-1.4C

WordwisePlus-1.4F

Ancillary programs and utilities (multiple vendors)^[1]

Spellcheck disks and ROMS

Printer driver ROMs

References