Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

At last, I continue a series of essentials for writers.

The first Some Essentials for Writers was posted December 10th, 2012. I actually promised that I would write some more parts to that post. Well, 7 1/2 years later, here we go.

I have been working recently with things called Jekyll, Markdown, GitHub, Git, and the Atom editor. 

The one thing in common for all is ASCII text. American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The aforementioned Atom is an ASCII text editor that has lots of features to it. I guess it is better at many things than my old favorite Vim. (I still like Vim better.)

The one great advantage of ASCII is that it seems to live forever. I guess it won’t actually live forever, but I have been working with ASCII text since the late 1970s (yes, I am that old) and as long as I copy files from floppy disks before all the floppy disk hardware dies, I am okay.

Writings I wrote using WordStar are unreadable, unless you have a copy of WordStar still running. Writings I wrote using WordPerfect are unreadable, unless you have a copy of WordPerfect running. There are pieces of software that can convert WordStar and WordPerfect files, but with ASCII, just about any computer can read ASCII.

Long live ASCII. And by the way, I have a Kaypro portable computer that runs CP/M and WordStar. Still the best display and keyboard for writing ever made.