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The Last Word 3.0 Reference Manual

SpartaDOS utilities, and a Macro Assembler, it was always my ambition to write a word processor for the Atari 8 which coupled the innovative and flexible approach of public domain programs like TextPro with the robustness and professional, commercial-quality presentation of PaperClip and AtariWriter.

In 1989 I began sketching out rough ideas on paper, but it wasn’t until nearly ten years later that I’d acquired the necessary skills in Assembly Language to actually start writing the program. After six months and hundreds of hours of work, version 1.0 of The Last Word was complete. At the time, the program was only 19K long, occupied no memory under the Operating System ROM (making it compatible with SpartaDOS

3.2and DOS XE), and included several innovations, such as a ten line scrolling print preview window in 80 columns, a keyboard macro language, a built-in mini DOS menu, the ability to load several documents at once on an expanded memory machine, and a non-linear text buffer model which overcame the sluggishness many word processors exhibited when inserting and deleting text at the top of large files.

The finished program was sent off to New Atari User (formerly Page 6) Magazine in mid 1999, but by that time the title’s publication was sporadic at best and I never heard anything back from Les Ellingham, the magazine’s editor. At around the same time, New Atari User ceased publication entirely, and without access to the Internet, what contact I had with the Atari fraternity was completely severed. However – and somewhat incredibly – I was still using the Atari as my main (and only) computer for word processing. Since I still enjoyed programming, I continued to update the program up to version 2.1 which was completed in 2001. I felt that the program did just about everything it had set out to do and I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to add to it.

In the same year a 286 IBM PC compatible came into my possession, and The Last Word was somewhat overshadowed by Windows 3.1 and Word for Windows 2.0. Even though I was still somewhat behind the times, the PC opened up a whole new world and began to make writing programs for the Atari seem like a rather pointless exercise (especially without any kind of user base for my software). Within a couple of years, with access to the Internet and a more powerful Windows computer, I began to concentrate on PC construction and maintenance. The Atari was consigned to a box on top of a cupboard and for years I thought no more about it.

It wasn’t until late 2008 after a nostalgic conversation with a friend who, like me, had fond recollections of 6502 assembly language programming that I decided to retrieve the Atari and find out if there were still any Internet forums dedicated to the old computer. I was surprised to discover there was still a thriving online Atari community, and astonished by the number and variety of technological developments that had been devised in the intervening years.

Fortunately, my 65XE (which had been upgraded to 130XE standard some fifteen years previously) and XF551 disk drive were both still fully functional (not to mention surprisingly well preserved) and it wasn’t long before I’d bought an SIO2SD device, transferred most of my 5¼” floppy disks to the PC, and ran The Last Word 2.1 on an emulated Atari for the first time. Soon afterwards, I set up a website at www.atari8.co.uk and released the word processor, along with the macro assembler and some other utilities. After adopting the forums at www.atariage.com as my second home, I received immediate (and mostly positive) feedback on the word processor, although I was also alerted to a fatal bug which meant the program wouldn’t work on NTSC Ataris. Fortunately the bug was easily fixed and LW soon built up a following among fans of “serious” Atari applications.

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