SECRTARY WORD PROCESSOR PRELIMINARY DOCUMENTATION Once upon a time many years ago when North Star first started putting out systems, there was a need for a word processor that was easy to use, easy to learn, and cheap. There were very few word processors available and none available for North Star DOS. Video terminals and full screen editors were not common, most systems used ASR33 teletypes for I/O and most people had much less than 64K of memory. This led to the development of MARYELLN, a word processor for the North Star DOS. It used less than 8K of memory so the rest of RAM could hold the text, it was line oriented instead of screen oriented so it could be used with a TTY, and most of the commands were similar to the ones used in North Star BASIC. Anyone knowing BASIC could immediately use MARYELLN. The source code was assembled using an early assembler that required that all of the code be resident in memory at one time. Therefore to save memory, comments were kept to a minimum. Later it took 2, 3 and eventually 5 files to assemble separately and link together to form the final program. MARYELLN did all the usual editor/word processor functions: edit, load, save, justify, line fill, center, number pages, move, copy, find, list, print, and change. Later, MARYELLN, was greatly enhanced and was renamed SECRTARY (8 characters) because of so many questions about why it was called MARYELLN. The enhanced features included a more sophisticated installation procedure, underlining, imbedded commands, line wrap around on input, automatic insertion of names and addresses from a BASIC file, additional commands like STATUS, and the ability to load North Star BASIC programs in token format, convert them to ASCII, and edit them as a normal SECRTARY file. I should point out that a "normal SECRTARY file" used the format of the old assembler or programs such as XEK, SCS etc where the line consisted of a character count, 2 byte binary line number the text, and a carriage return (no line feed). SECRTARY still consisted of five source files which had to be assembled separately and there were very few comments. SECRTARY is still popular today on North Star systems. The source code was merged together and maintained under CP/M however (some 5000 lines of it). Later, a CP/M version was implemented. By this time, however, full screen editors were popular and the limitation of line numbers and memory resident files was unpopular for large text files even with the "CHAIN" command. SECRTARY is now available to CPM users for people who need a word processor for a few letters but do not want the expense or complications of the more extensive full screen editors. To get SECRTARY to work, first assemble it using ASM or MAC. It uses 8080 code not Z80 code. The full user manual is contained in files USERMAN0.TXT, USERMAN1.TXT, USERMAN2.TXT etc. After loading the program, execute it and enter the command "LOAD USERMAN1.TXT". The program will load the file and tell you the size. Then type "LIST" (no quotes) and the file will be listed on the screen. To get a hard copy of it, first enter the command "DEVICE L" to have the listing or printing go to the list device. (LIST shows line numbers and control commands, PRINT justifies, and applies the commands to the final text). After setting the device to the list device, simply enter the command PRINT. Each file will "CHAIN" in the next file and you will have the full user manual which will teach you to use the other features. "DEVICE C" returns the print or listing to the console device.