Re: Larry Wall on conlanging

On Wed, 19 May 1999, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:

> Years ago (after I ditched my Sinclar ZX-Spectrum), I started out with
> a real PC - it had a 640kb of memory and _two_ floppy drives. I have
> written megabytes of texts, grammars, dictionaries and stories on the
> thing. In fact, the song about the falling plums was first written on
> that PC.
As well as the first version of my Valdyan dictionary - both
Valdyan-Dutch and Dutch-Valdyan as well as a thematic dictionary all
on one 360K floppy. I would have bought a computer of my own with
some money I happened to come into at that time, if we hadn't moved
in together and bought a washing machine.

> It had an amber screen which was ever so restful for the eyes
> and it was absolutely impossible to play games on it,
Except Tetris and Blockout, of course.

> or to tinker with
> it
Until I bought an "undocumented WordPerfect 4.2" book which had a
floppy with some very nice utilities in the back flap, like something
to read *and change* system memory. I used it to make a Latin WP 4.2,
because you could load all of WP into memory, hack it, and copy it
back on another floppy. I've still got the book, but the utils only
work on an XT...

   Irina

            Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastinay.
                     irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
       http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/index.html (English)
    http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/backpage.html (Nederlands)