#amstrad pcw

Well hello ladies and gentleman.  Welcome to the second blog entry of my blog a day for a whole month of January.

So today I start with something I actually paid money to buy when I was playing around with DOSBox.

As the title has informed you it was LocoScript 2 Pro for PC.  I bought the download version from the Locoscript website.

Why would I do that I hear you ask...I when I was at school, we didn't have PCs at the time.  We had Amstrad PCW8256 word processors.  I had one also at home.  So using Locoscript was a thing I used to use regularly.

Now I admit our PCW8256 eventually bit the dust and we no longer have it but it was a machine I spent many an hour sitting either doing homework or writing various short stories and novels as I aspired to be an author long ago.

Sadly many of these files are lost and will never see the light of day so much of my early writing has been lost.  As all the 3" disks we had have been disposed of.

That may be tragic but equally reading some of it I printed using the included dot matrix printer of the time.  Trust me some things are best never to be seen again.

So Locoscript has a little bit of my writing heritage in my soul.  So being able to use it on a PC was just a thing I thought would be cool.

Now admittedly because I'm running it through DosBox.  You can't print from it as my i7 doesn't have a parallel port.

However it can  be exported as RTF I believe or text file then you could import into something like LibreOffice etc if you really are desperate to print it.

Honestly for me it's purely for the nostalgia of sitting typing using LocoScript.  I'm sure no one else in their right mind would pay £10 for the privilege but to me it was worth it as it is a piece of history to me.

The many hours I spent as a teenager typing away with its very clunky and very uncomfortable keyboard into the small hours.

My fevered mind churning out twisted tales in the form of Macabre.  Where I invented serial killers but wrote them in a style of a true crime book. Various other short stories, all which I know are lost to time and will never resurface.

I'm sure many of them were dire or the ramblings of a guy who had no real world experience so to the fact they will never be recovered is not a bad thing.

LocoScript 2 Pro PC definitely is not the cutting edge of word processors and never will be.  But there is something about it that just inspires joy...