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Building The Navy Intranet
wiredog writes "The Washington Post Business section has an article about the ongoing upgrade/integration of the US Navy's computer systems. The $6.9 billion project is the largest Federal IT project ever attempted. The mission is to get rid of, or upgrade, all the old software still in use (including, I kid you not, WordStar), do the same for all the hardware (including, I kid you not, typewriters), and link it all together. There are 100,000 different applications that have to be evaluated, and then either upgraded or replaced. I remember using WordStar. 20 years ago."
I kid you not, wordstar probably NEVER crashes on them. :)
Vi and EMACS are great, but for word processing, and I don't me lame desktop publishing which is what most programs like MS-Word and WordPerfect do today, for word processing, no one has created a better interface. Once you know the commands, you can virtually fly through editing a text document. Emacs and Vi are good, but they are designed for editing source code, not text.
Wordstar Still rules!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
My pen works fine too, but it isn't recognized on my network.
Exactly what is so laughable about using WordStar and typewriters ? A competent WordStar user (and in the day, Wordstar was THE word processor for power users) could almost certainly outdo the best Microsoft Word or free-software-Word-clone user in 95% of the everyday typing tasks that people need to do.
And typewriters still DO have their place. A good typewriter is still the fastest way to fill out a form, or fill out a label to put on a file folder, or even, sometimes, whip out a quick letter.
Ridiculing tried-and-proven technology is about as arrogant as ridiculing conventional mail.
95% of computer users would be just as productive with a typewriter and a subscription to [fill in the blank] pr0n magazines.
don't be knocking wordstar or typewriters when they get the job done usually just as well.
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
"If wordstar and typewriters are working, why spend $6b to replace them?"
Because the Navy wants everything tied together into one large directory designed for secure communication using standard software. Communicating encrypted messages is much eaiser when everything is standardized.
I mean, the reliability of wordstar and even typewritters is infinitely higher than the one of Microsoft Word/Excel.
If that seems either insightful or funny to you, go try creating some documents on a typewriter. Personally, I'd prefer a word processor with a lousy, cluttered UI, an annoying paperclip that keeps batting its eyelashes at me and a habit of crashing every two minutes over a typewriter any day.
Wordstar, however, wouldn't be so bad. It wasn't so bad, back in the day. Assuming you could get printer drivers for it. That wasn't a problem years ago, but now... (yes, kiddies, printer drivers were once the job of the application, not the OS, or even the printing system. Luckily you could usually just type in a few codes to tell your app how to use your dot matrix printer's italics mode, bold mode, etc. For fancier stuff, though... ugh).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Because the Navy wants everything tied together into one large directory designed for secure communication using standard software.
What a pipe dream. This is what IT companies have been promising for decades and have never delivered . Probably the last time this was accomplished was when an entire company ran off of one mainframe. One set of software, one set of terminals, one set of administrators, etc.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Have you ever seen some of the forms the government uses? Plain text is not going to cut it.
XML, on the other hand, may be just the ticket they are looking for. It would Allow standard interfaces to be made for data entry and specialized for to be printed.
The Military still relies quite heavily on printed papers, signatures, and photocopies - things that can be forged. It would be particularly nice to see them invest a big chunk of that money into digital signatures and encryption, so they could eliminate much of the wasted paper and free up huge amounts of space (one DDS4 tape is alot smaller than 20GB printed data).
Of course, a change this massive would cause the mental collapse of thousands of officials still unfamiliar with technology and unwilling to learn.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
OK, there have been uncountable posts now that discuss the pros and cons of WordStar.
The issue was not that everybody used WordStar and that now they have to switch. The issue was they everybody used a zillion different programs (of which WordStar was one example).
The idea is, as many other have pointed out, to improve communications. A first step is to make sure that applications are standardized. If everybody had used WordStar, they could probably have made this happen with that program, but in reality M$ Word was probably much more common.
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