ZX81 word processing

We're going to do some word processing on possibly the most advance word processor in the world, forget microsoft word 2020 (or whatever the latest "version" is)
This system has it all !!!
So going through the setup, we have the sinclair zx81, the z printer, a memotech 16K ram pak, otherwise we would be limited to like one page of text or something, and that would be if we didn't load the wordprocesor software
The software we're going to be using to write our little essay is called TASWORD. It occupys about 3K of RAM so we can write about 16 pages of text:
24line * 32cxharacters wide = 768 per page
12 K bytes * 1024 bytes per K = 12288 characters = 16 pages of text
www.zx81stuff.o...
It has a one font, upper case only, and if your lucky enough to own a dictionary, then it has a spell checker lol, no colours, but hey you can't be put off if it doesn't have proportionally space fonts or even more than one font :-)
So first I have to load this program, now back in the 80s this would be off tape cassette, but since I have a desktop PC, we can load from that. Yes I know this is crazy, but someone (lol) might be interested!!

[@PlayerClarinet]

Worth remembering that computing in the 70s and 80s really struggled with word processing. High-end commercial systems costing many thousands of dollars were great for things like payroll and inventory, but word processing was its own specialty. Many companies just stuck with typewriters for another decade or so.

[@Fifury161]

Technically it's not a thermal printer - it's a spark gap printer. The paper is black with a light coating of aluminium foil - the spark burns the foil away revealing the black paper underneath. One coincidental aside was the fact that the paper was the exact width of a cassette and you could print out cassette inlays.

[@byteforever7829]

All this time I thought it was thermal but I was wrong, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Printer en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark_printing

[@lloydgarland4667]

@@byteforever7829 You can use thermal paper in those, FAX paper works just fine.

[@Alex_Valentine]

Sir Clive wanted these in schools over the BBC Micro but how could it compete when it has missing characters like # ! , ?

[@TheTurnipKing]

If needed it would have been fairly trivial to create a dongle with those charcters (and software, like Tasword) that plugged into the expansion port. (Since the system only has 1K of RAM onboard, there's the whole 64k memory map to slot ROM software into). But the system was under active development and the ZX82 (which became the Speccy) would answer most complaints, I suspect. The character set was far more complete and had user definable characters.

[@idea1407]

Brilliant

[@Simcore999]

15 minutes, paper gets stuck and the video ends short( Thanks for trying 🤣🤣🤣

[@byteforever7829]

The whole printer was stuck, got another video attempting to fix it kzbin.info/www/bejne/g4G9dJ1ortypmas

[@Simcore999]

@@byteforever7829 It s ok, was trying to see if the format printed was the same as on the screen or wrapped around

[@m0nde]

Good video on how unworkable word processing on the ZX81 would have been, only caps, typing on that horrible keyboard, a truly horrible UX, and a tiny printer with expensive paper. It would have been horrible for students to use this if Sir Clive had managed to get this into schools.

[@j.t.5178]

Oh god, try writing a 10-page paper on this then printing it on that printer and handing it in to your professor.

[@JCMayPE]

No support for data files is a real hassle. I'm in the process of fixing mine. Assembled on Christmas Day, 1981. The guy that assembled it at the factory signed the heat sink. In retrospect, a bad move. The solder job is SO sketchy.

[@rch6]

You can't do lower case letters!?