ANTIC Interview 361 - Bob Ertl, REWRITE Word Processor - a podcast by Randy Kindig, Kay Savetz, Brad Arnold

 

In 1987, Bob Ertl’s master's thesis was titled "Narrowing the Gap Between the Word Processing Needs of Teachers and the Capabilities of Word Processors for Atari 8-bit Computers." As part of that project, he created a word processor for the Atari computers, aimed at the needs of math teachers. The word processor is called REWRITE and was never widely available. It was only used by a handful of teachers.

 

Bob has released two versions of the word processor in ATR format, along with the Mac/65 source code and the manual. I scanned his thesis. All of this is available at Internet Archive.

 

This interview took place on July 10, 2018.

 

"My wife would help me with this. The way she would help me is she was patient enough to let me explain what my assembly language code was supposed to do. So I had to say it clearly enough for her to be able to follow it, and in doing so I was often able to find the errors that I was looking for."