[rob74]

Are you sure about that? The page you link says that "The 100,000-word spelling checker lets you check a range of text, look up a single word, check continuously, and add words to the user dictionary", but doesn't mention underlining words. I also couldn't find a screenshot of that feature. Actually, with the AmigaOS 1.x color scheme, the squiggly lines would have probably been orange, because the standard color scheme was black/white/blue/orange (in AmigaOS 2 and above it was black/white/grey/blue to enable a 3D effect on the controls, so the highlight color would have had to be blue?!).

[sien]

OK.

It does have a real time spell checker. But it doesn't seem to have the squiggly line. The screen blinks at you when you type a word it can't find.

I've just run Prowrite 2 and 3.1.1 via FS-UAE.

So my memory is wrong about that feature have a red squiggly line.

It did have realtime checking. Also Prowrite was WYSIWYG. The realtime checking is neat, but it's actually a bit annoying with the blink. The red squiggly line is a better way to show that there is an unrecognised word.

Thanks for getting me to check.

[sien]

The 'check continuously' is the thing.

I'm going to run it and have a look in a bit and get back to you.

It looks like 1st Word on the Atari ST also have a continuous spell checker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Word

From the link for 1st Word :

"Among the many new features was a spell checker with a 40,000 word dictionary, although lacking many American English terms,[11] a mail merge program, footnotes and semi-automated hyphenation.[12] The spell checker included the relatively rare, for the time, option to check on-the-fly. It also added document statistics display, including the number of characters, pages, etc"

Honestly I'd guess it's one of those things that possibly originated at Xerox Parc and then got added to consumer products from the 1980s onwards.

Personally, I remember it because I remember seeing Word 6 and thinking 'at last they have caught up to Prowrite'.

[jll29]

1st Word on the Atari ST 520+ with monochrome monitor: that was how the far future felt like in 1986.

With the exception of the somewhat wobbly cheap keyboard, that was the best and most distraction-free setup I have ever seen for WYSIWYG word processing (sadly never tried the Xerox workstations).

[rob74]

Sorry, but as a former Amiga user I have to jump on the opportunity to disrespect the Atari ST: wasn't the same thing (WYSIWYG text editing or even desktop publishing on a monochrome monitor) already possible years before with the Apple Mac? I mean, it was nicknamed the "Jackintosh" for a reason. Ok, it was only one year (the Mac being famously released in 1984, and the Atari ST in 1985). And of course the Atari ST was more affordable, it had that going for it.

[TheOtherHobbes]

MacWrite was very basic, even compared to 1st Word, although it did support multiple fonts, which weren't possible on the ST without some effort.

1st Word Plus (1987) was a huge improvement and used professionally in magazine publishing.

MS Word was always bloated and poorly-designed in comparison.

In terms of getting useful work done with a minimum of effort, all of the 80s WPs, both command-line and WYSIWYG, were superior to Word.

[vidarh]

I can't find screenshots or descriptions of that either (but it doesn't really say much either way - I couldn't find much about the spellchecking at all). But re: colors, a lot of applications would open their own screens and set their own palette, so the Workbench palette isn't necessarily relevant.

[abanana]

Indeed, no relevance at all. Sorry rob74, that's a misunderstanding of how large applications most often tended to work on the Amiga. They didn't generally open a window on the Workbench screen, they opened their own screen. The keyboard shortcut <Amiga key>-<M> cycled between them. A word processor's screen could then have 16+ colours.

[rob74]

No problem! My recollection is a bit hazy, and I'm not active enough in retrocomputing to refresh it. I was aware that applications could use their own graphics modes, but I wasn't aware anymore just how often "productivity" software did that too. But of course, it made sense, since the Workbench screen was limited to 4 colors (in order to save memory, I guess, especially the precious "chip memory" that was accessible to the custom chips), and on their own screen they could use a whopping 16 colors :)