A peek through the Magic Window. Gary D. Corbin.
Apeek Through The Magic Window
When you are trying to convince your spouse to let you buy a home computer, anything that will display its usefulness in his or her terms is a great help. The programs that finally sold my wife on the system were the word processors. She is a professional secretary and was quick to grasp the beauty of a word processing system.
Before retiring from a full time paying job to raise our kids, she had an IBM electronic typewriter with a heart of pure silicon. This machine had the rudiments of a word processor, but was limited in its functions. Then her employer installed a full-blown Xerox word processor. While I was forced to admit that an Apple-based system would never match the utility of that $20,000 system, I could honestly point out that it fell somewhere between her electronic IBM and the Xerox, for about the same money as the IBM.
I began sharing Creative's reviews of Apple-based word processors with her, her enthusiasm grew, she got several book manuscripts to type . . . We now own an Apple system complete with Epson printer and Magic Window word processor.
The Magic Window system is one of the neatest low cost word crunchers for the Apple. Its features are too numerous to discuss here, but for those who are interested Creative Computing did a review in the 1982 Software Buyer's Guide issue. In fact, it was that review that sold us on the system.
I differ with that review in only one respect: a fast typist can overtype the program and lose a letter as the line wraps around. My wife types close to 85 wpm average and on short, common words like and and the her speed approaches that of light. When one of these words comes at the end of a line, it frequently loses something in the wraparound. The only other complaint she has about the system is that she can never remember the steps to initialize a data disk to store her files. Hence, the following solution.
These two programs and EXEC file will automatically initialize a Magic Window data disk, transfer the SYS.OPTIONS file, and scratch the DOS image and Hello program. By eliminating DOS and the Hello program, an extra 34 sectors or so are freed for data storage.
Entering this set of programs is quite simple.
Type in the program Lomem Reset and save it on a Magic Window data disk. (If you don't want to keep them on a data disk, use the FID program on the Apple System Master disk to transfer the SYS.OPTIONS file from a Magic Window data disk.)
Type in the program Magic Initialize and save it on the same disk as Lomem Reset.
Use the Make Text program on the Apple System Master disk to create a text file called MAGIC. Instructions for using the Make Text program are given in the Apple DOS manual, pp. 61-64. This file should contain these instructions:
RUN LOMEM RESET
BLOAD SYS. OPTIONS
RUN MAGIC INITIALIZE
This file is then saved on the same disk as the Lomem Reset, Magic Initialize, and SYS. OPTIONS files.
Your automatic initializer is now ready to use. Fire up Applesoft, insert the disk with these programs on it, type:
EXECMAGIC
Press RETURN and follow the prompts given in the program.
Remember the following cautions: Both DOS and the memory pointers are altered. If your typing errors cause the program to crash and you don't get the NORMAL EXIT message, the alterations have not been repaired. If this happens, you can reboot DOS with the System Master disk. There are less drastic ways, but they are beyond the scope of this article.
Table: Listing 1. Lomem Reset.
Table: Listing 2. Magic Initialize.