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Ordbehandla med Teddy. Manual. Liber 1984 Teddy - 1984

History lookback. The Teddy Word Processor was marketed in a very modest manner by Liber Läromedel back in 1984. The ABC80 was on its way out. The IBM PC was already 2.5 years old. But there were to many ABC80 in Sweden that we couldn't neglect.
This was a hobby project made in the summer of 1984. With almost no word processor at the school, but a fairly high-tech network for our Swedish ABC80 computers we needed something better to write our stories and our code (yes, a better editor as well). Driven by a teacher that needed a word processor for her upcoming book project and a good tradition of assembly programmers at the school, Max and I took some summernights to write a pretty decent editor/wordprocessor.

In the end Teddy could barely hold its own source code in memory so we had to strip away all comments. A future project would be to port Teddy to java. NOT.

Teddy had in fact features like blockcrypto, hyphenation and recording of macros. The ABC80 itself had only a 40 column screen (or 80 columns with hardware plugins) so Teddy came with a built in virtual screen that scrolled sideways. The program itself occupied about 16 kilobytes(!). It was sold both in a network version and stand alone (ROM-cartridge). My favorite Z80-opcode was DJNZ. We used to call it devil-jump.

Thanks to Blackebergs Gymnasium and Sten-Axel Julin[1] and Margareta Östman[2] for all support back then.

Those were the days. Now I'm a computer consultant in Lund. My buddy programmer Max Shapiro renamed to Max Tegmark and now lives with his family as a cosmologist in Boston, MA where he is Professor in Physics at MIT.

Magnus Bodin

[1] Sten-Axel was our Math and computer teacher and indeed a vast computational inspiration for the whole school back then. He has once programmed the World famous Swedish BESK computer. He resigned from Blackebergs Gymnasium a few years ago and now drives all kinds of trains and buses for SL, Stockholm. Thanks SAJ for the time 1983-1986.
[2] Margareta was our Swedish-teacher that used Teddy to compile a small booklet called "Meningsbyggnad" (ISBN 91-542-1164-6). Margareta is nowadays a researcher in the field of the French language at the University of Stockholm.
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