Electric Pencil on the TRS-80

As the story goes, 40-year old filmmaker Michael Shrayer was producing a Pepsi-Cola commercial in 1974 when he had a crisis of conscience on set. He looked around at the shoot, the production, the people, the apparatus and found a kind of veil lifted from his eyes. Prior to that moment, it was work. Suddenly it was insanity in service to a "dancing bottle cap." Almost on-the-spot, he swore off Hollywood for good, tore up his union card (forfeiting union pensions in the process!), and moved to California to semi-retire as a beach bum.

After moving to California, with time on his hands, he found a distraction in a new-ish gizmo on the market, the MITS Altair 8800 . Once a creator, always a creator, Shrayer put his efforts into learning how the machine worked, and more importantly how to make things with it. That was not an easy task back then on a machine whose base model used physical toggle switches to input byte code.

Undeterred, he put together Software Package 1, a collection of public domain development tools, then started work on ESP-1 ("Extended" Software Package 1). Tired of using a typewriter to write documentation, he wondered if he could use the Altair itself to help him compose the document.

That software didn't exist, so he wrote it himself.

Dubbed the Electric Pencil by he and his wife, it was used it to write its own manual, and began its spread through the home computing scene. Landing on the TRS-80 series in 1978 opened it to a mass market, and the word processor genre was well and truly born.

For the first couple of years Electric Pencil was the only word processing option for home microcomputers. This gave Michael Shrayer what some may call arrogance, but which I'll call "work/life balance" to utterly ignore the support phone line come 5pm sharp. Customers literally had no choice but to wait until morning to call again. Shrayer was living the dream, I guess is what I'm saying.

(He also said he sold 10,000 copies. At ~$200/per. In late 70s money. Again, "living the dream.")

In 1982, James Fallows called Electric Pencil, "satisfying to the soul." My expectations are considerably lower than having my soul soothed, but maybe I can at least find a place for it in my heart?

Historical Context

My Testing Rig

• trs80gp v2.5.5 on Windows 11
  • Emulating the default TRS-80 Model III
    • 48K RAM
    • 4 floppy drives
    • TRSDOS v1.3
• Electric Pencil 2.0z

I can tell already this is going to be a little painful. No undo. A bit of a clunky UX with the underlying system. No spell checking. Limited number of visible lines of text. Basic cut-copy-paste is nowhere to be seen. But maybe I don't rely on those things as much as I assume I do in this context?

Let's Get to Work

The primary work I'm committing to is to write this very section, the bulk of the review, within Electric Pencil itself. I'll also use it to revise the document as much as possible, but this blog platform has unique tools I need to finalize the piece. Once I feel comfortable using Pencil, I think I'll take a stab at writing some fan-fiction in it. Any Mork & Mindy fans out there?

Shazbot!

I am off to a rough start.

The simple fact of the matter is that the interaction between a modern keyboard, an emulator, and Electric Pencil is not strictly harmonious. One of the primary interactions with the software worked best with a key that wasn't even part of the original TRS-80 hardware.

I monkey-paw the keyboard, trying to deduce which modern key maps to which retro key and finally figure it out. I write it down on my memo pad and refer to it constantly during my evaluation.

Once I'm into Electric Pencil though, I'm rather struck by its stark simplicity. I am here to write, just me and my words; alone together with no external pressure to do anything but the task at hand. It's nice!

I'm definitey reminded of any number of "distraction free word processors" in recent years and dozens of attempts to return to a clean, uncluttered interface for writing. I suppose, like Pepsi executives reinventing souless product shoots over and over, we are similarly doomed to reinvent "a blank screen with a blinking cursor" from time to time.

Once I start typing though, I realize the blank screen is less a great, untapped plain of fruitful potential and more of a Mad Max style desert. War Boys are at the ready, poised to steal my blood and guzzoline.

Markdown like its 1982

Initially I was concerned about how I would translate my writing into something I can use on the blog. It struck me that I kind of don't need to worry about it. Electric Pencil saves in plain ASCII format so Markdown is a realistic option. Rather than bring esoteric file formats of the past to the present, we'll instead bring text formatting of the present into the past.

Well, that was the working theory until I learned that there is simply no way to type things like [ ] or { } or ~ and even _ requires a weird CTRL - 0 combination. I hadn't mentally prepared myself for the idea that the physical keyboards of the past might present their own writing challenges unique from the software.

Still, < > and / exist, making HTML input an option for the missing characters. I move on and discover organically that CTRL-D deletes a character. The brief adrenaline rush of feeling attuned to the vibe of the program is nice, until I saved the document.

Until I tried to save the document.

No lie, this represents is my sixth attempt at getting things working. Look, I do not claim to be a smart person. I overlooked an obvious warning message or two, simply because I didn't expect them. I was looking to the left for cross-traffic when I should have looked to the right for the coming train.

A fun fact about Electric Pencil is that when you save your work, you are saving from the current location of the cursor to the end of the document. Think for a moment about the implications of that statement. There will be no advanced warning when you do this, only an after-the-fact message about what was done. It will obediently wipe out large chunks, or even all, of your document, depending on the current cursor position.

How to save in Electric Pencil

1. Move the cursor to the start of the document with CTL-B (move to the "beginning")
2. CTL-K to open the command tool screen.
3. type save filename/extension:drive# as save mork/txt:2
   • Can't remember the filename? type dir :drive#
   • Don't see your file listed? That's because dir only lists /pcl files. dir *:drive# will list everything on disk, including /txt files like I'm using.

If you make a mistake and lose your work, the manual explicitly puts the blame on you, "The truth of the matter is that...you screwed up." It then says there are recovery techniques you can learn if you buy a copy of the book TRS-80 Disk & Other Mysteries by Harvard Pennington, the same guy who bought the rights to Electric Pencil from Shrayer. The same guy who published this very version of the program. Hate the game, not the player?

But wait, the emulator itself has its own quirks.

How to save in trs80gp

1. In the Diskette menu, go to an empty drive number
2. Select m3-trsdos-blank.dmk to get a blank, formatted disk for your work
   • See how the disk name has << >> around it? That means it is referencing an internal copy of a master blank disk. Your changes to it will not be saved to this disk
3. In the drive menu for this disk, select Export... and give your disk a name.
4. In the drive menu for this disk, select Eject for the << >> named disk
5. Now Insert disk... and select the disk you exported above. This disk is your personal copy, saved to the host operating system, ready to accept your writes.
   • When you finish working and want to shut down the emulator, check the Diskette menu to see if any disks are prefixed with *. If so, that disk has changes in memory that have not yet been written to the filesystem. Those changes will be lost if you shut down.
   • Use Export... on that diskette to save its changes out.

With the various things that could go wrong having actually gone wrong, dear reader I doubt you'll be surprised to learn that I lost my work multiple times. I cannot blame Electric Pencil for everything, as the emulator kind of worked against me as well, but the total experience of using this in 2025 was quite frustrating. I persevered for your entertainment. The tip jar is to your right.

A loss for words

Back in the day, Electric Pencil was notorious for losing the user's typing. In Whole Earth Software Review, Spring 1984, Tony Bove and Cheryl Rhodes wrote, "(It) dropped characters if you typed too fast. During “wraparound” it nibbles at your keystrokes while it does what it wants."

I did not personally encounter this in my time with the program. It may have been addressed as a bug fix in v2.0z, though I can't find evidence it did. It may be that the emulator itself provides more consistent keyboard polling than the original hardware did and keeps up with my typing. Or maybe I didn't flex my superior Typing of the Dead skills hard enough?

No, for me the most immediate and continually frustrating aspect of using Electric Pencil is its "overtype" mode. This is a feature you still see in text editors and word processors, maybe hidden under the "Advanced" preferences, requiring a conscious choice to enable it.

The modern default is to "insert" when typing. Place a cursor, start typing, and your words are injected at the point of the cursor. The text to the right moves to accommodate the new text.

Overtype, as the name suggests, types over existing words replacing them. The amount of time I've spent reversing out inadvertent overtyping when I just wanted to add a space, or especially a line break, must surely have subtracted a full hour of my life by now. I have to remember to jump into "insert mode" when I want to retroactively add more space between paragraphs.

I'm not one to suggest it is without its merits, though if my life were dependent on finding a reason for its existence my life would be forfeit. But what I can say absolutely is that losing your words to overtype really sucks in a program with no "undo" option.

When fans become stewards

I mentioned Harvard Pennington earlier, and I want to spend a little time talking about the transfer of Electric Pencil from Shrayer to Pennington.

I'm using v2.0z of Electric Pencil and it would be unfair to fail to note Michael Shrayer's absence in its development. According to the v2.0z manual, "Shrayer continued to sell (Electric Pencil) until January of 1981. By this time (it) was losing ground...Michael was not ready to devote his life to the daily chore of...doing business around the world."

Harvard Pennington had already published a book written in Electric Pencil and wanted to keep his beloved software alive. Shrayer sold Pencil to Pennington's company International Jewelry Group. Yes, you read that right, "jewelry." But it's OK, they just called themselves IJG and their hard pivot was papered over nicely. "Pennington got together with...fans and programmers" to create a patched, improved version.

Now I say "improved" because I read a review or two that suggested that. I can say absolutely that the CTRL - K command menu in v2.0z is a marked improvement over v1. It helps push some nuclear options (like CLR to clear all text) behind a much-needed protective wall.

But it also has, in hindsight perhaps, a couple of baffling decisions. First, if IJG was trying to improve the product, I don't really understand why the save file mechanism remains so inextricably linked to cursor position. Rather than fix it, a slightly snarky lambaste in the manual was added. Good job team, problem solved?

The biggest change is the utter removal of WordStar-esque cursor controls. v1 had it, v2 doesn't. The cursor control keys are "unused" according to the v2.0z manual. The functionality was removed and replaced with nothing.

Why concede a feature to your competitor that is so useful they literally named their own product for it? Just above I even called it WordStar-esque despite Pencil being first-to-market!

In Creative Computing Magazine, November 1984, Pennington, newly elected chairman of the board at IJG, wrote an article about the future of computing. A jewelry salesman turned author and Pencil fanboy, now in charge of stewarding Pencil's future, saw the coming wave of Macintosh-inspired GUIs. What did he think of this sea-change?

"So what is in our future? Windows? A mouse? Icons? This is the hot stuff for 1984. How do we know it is the hot stuff? Because the computer press tells us. And how do they know? Because the marketing people tell them (and they know) because the finance people have determined the next "hot" item. How does the financial community know? They don't. However, no one is going to tell them to take their money elsewhere ... If you can come up with an idea that is bizarre enough, you can probably raise (millions) to bring it to market ... It is hype."

Within two years of this bold, anti-GUI stance, Pennington would sell Electric Pencil to Electric Software Corporation. Later, PC Magazine would review ESC's v3.0 in the February 24, 1987 edition. They praised how much you got for $50, but also called it "not easy to learn" and "not for beginners." By then, with so much competition in the genre it had birthed, Electric Pencil was effectively dead.

Writer's block

As the v1 manual states, "THE BEST WAY TO LEARN TO OPERATE THIS SYSTEM IS TO USE IT !!!" That's proving true! Why did the v2.0z manual remove that statement?!

The learning curve is relatively shallow, benefitting from the software being sparse; there's just not that much to learn. From the perspective of a "daily driver," it's not growing on me. Getting into a flow is proving difficult.

(future Chris here; as I come back to edit this document later, the editing flows more freely though I can't claim it is "natural." More like I'm just better at anticipating quirks, and there are plenty.)

Part of editing is rearranging, but we need to forget what we know about "cut, copy, and paste." Those words had not yet been commonly adopted to describe those actions. Instead, we have the "block" tool. SHIFT - UP ARROW adds a visual marker to indicate the start of a block. Move the cursor and do that again to add a second marker at the end of a block. The text between markers is your block.

Place the cursor elsewhere in the document and CTRL - H will clone the delimited block into the current cursor position; the original block stays as-is. You can clone as much as you like. "Cut" as we understand it today doesn't exist. CTRL - U deletes the block. It is GONE, no longer in memory at all. Remember also, there is no "undo" in this program, so gone really does mean GONE. Good enough for government work, I guess, just watch your step.

The only feature left worth discussing is find/replace. CTRL - V brings up a modal screen for searching for a word. In James Fallow's discussion on it, he noted that he would use it for complicated words. He would insert a * or some other unusual character to stand-in for a complex name, for example the Russian surname Zhemchuzhnikov. Then, when he was done editing he would do a find-and-replace on the character for the surname.

It only looks for the literal, case-sensitive text you type, although wild cards may be used. This is also your only method for jumping to known parts of the document. Search for a word and replace it with nothing to jump from search result to search result.

Dull Pencil

Aside from some era-specific, esoteric commands, that's basically all Electric Pencil has to offer. It would have been fun if I could have tried the tape-dictation controls to transcribe a conversation. Spell-check isn't part of the base system, though it was available as an add-on.

It is bare-bones, utilitarian, and sometimes frustrating for a modern user. It's forcing me to evaluate my personal threshold between "just enough" and "not enough" in such software. For me, this one is "not enough."

With a few quality of life additions I suppose it could be sharpened up for the "distraction free" crowd. Maybe v3.0 of Electric Pencil PC is just right, if overtype is your jam? As-is, it is hard to recommend it on the TRS-80 for much more than writing a review of it.

But don't worry, I teased some fan-fiction and I am a man of my word.

One last thought

I'd like to return to the Creative Computing Magazine issue where Pennington kind of poo-pooed windows, mice, and icons, "What is their future? They are here to stay. That does not mean that they will be used."

In that same issue, Shrayer also gave his thoughts about the future of computing.

"I see computers making it possible for many of us to work at home in the near future. With high speed telecommunications, video recorders, holography, and the like, why should anyone have to go to a particular locale to be 'on the job'? In a few years modern communications will be able to put you literally face to face with anybody in the world."

Michael Shrayer died October 19, 2006 in Arlington, Texas. He was 72.

Sharpening the Stone

Ways to improve the experience, notable deficiencies, workarounds, and notes about incorporating the software into modern workflows (if possible).

Emulator Improvements

• trs80gp offers relatively minimal options for speeding up performance.
  • It automatically kicks in "Auto Turbo" mode when accessing the disk drive, so I didn't find it annoyingly slow to read/write even though I'm using virtual floppies. A virtual hard disk is an option, but configuration looks... complex. I'll dig into that later.
  • File > Turbo mode makes a noticeable difference in input and scroll speed. I didn't notice any troubles using that mode with this software.
  • It was definitely a time-saver to set up the Windows shortcut with launch parameters (Properties > Shortcut > Target) to auto-insert program and save disks on launch, enable "Turbo", and set the emulator's typing mode to "Typing Layout" (see Troubleshooting, below)
    -d1 "path\to\pencil.dsk" -d2 "path\to\save.dmk" -turbo -kl typ
• Options for those not running on Windows
  • The TRS-80 emulator scene itself seems fairly anemic, especially outside of Windows. There is a Javascript emulator, but it feels a little heavy for my lightweight needs, and the hosted online versions seem to disallow arbitrary disk insertion. I'm completely unclear how to get at my personal data even if I did manage to save my work.
    That said, it is open source on Github and may be a better option than my initial tests indicated. So I suppose you could run a Node server? Or run it in a web browser? to interface with an emulator which runs the software. How many abstraction layers are you willing to put up with?
  • For a native macOS app, the only option I can recommend is kind of non-native: run trs80gp and trstools in WINE. No other app is maintained to work on modern macOS, or if it runs its "experimental" or broken in some fundamental way to render it unusable.
  • On Linux, I'm still investigating.

Troubleshooting

• Remember: in trs80gp's Diskette menu if you see * beside a drive, that means it has been written to virtually but has not been written to the host operating system yet. This can happen if you have a diskette with <<>> brackets, indicating a virtual copy of an internally defined master diskette. Export that diskette, stat!
• Keyboard input has three options. One is notably called "Typing Layout" and it addresses the issues I encountered with certain character inputs doing a kind of double-input. For example typing ' always resulted in '7 printing to screen. "Typing Layout" felt much more stable and behaved as expected, though it had its own quirks (see What's Lacking, below)
• If you get an error saying NO FILE, you probably have the cursor at the end of the file and are trying to save.
• CTL-B to move to the start of the file before saving. Cannot stress this enough.

Getting Your Data into the Real World

• In a sense it is easy, and in a sense it is annoying. The easiest way I found to get my data out of TRSDOS world is through the utility trstools. Use it to browse your TRSDOS disk, then simply open a file and copy out the contents. It's just plain ASCII; there are no special word processing code embeds.
  • Caveat! There are no embeds unless you use the printer formatting functions! Then there are absolutely embedded codes and they're unfriendly to a modern workflow. They only apply to doing real printing to real vintage printers, so I recommend ignoring those features.

What's Lacking?

Speaking honestly, too much is missing to recommend Electric Pencil on the TRS-80 for a modern workflow.

• No undo whatsoever. This bit me more than once thanks to CTRL-T (delete TO end of line) and CTRL-Y (delete ENTIRE line) being right next to each other.
• You are essentially restricted to no formatting or a subset of markdown formatting.
• Getting the emulator keyboard and Electric Pencil to be happy together has simply not panned out for me.
  • If I use "Logical Layout" I get double-input on many keys.
  • If I use "Physical Layout" my muscle memory of where " lives (for example) betrays me every time.
  • If I use "Typing Layout" keys like BREAK stop working and keyboard commands for marking blocks of text SHIFT + arrow key don't work any more.
  • There is no perfect keyboard choice for this program that I can find.
• No spell-checking without a secondary package like Blue Pencil or Electric Webster's.
• Search is strictly, only case-sensitive.
• For writing a basic skeleton of a document for this very blog, it worked well-enough. But to restrict all editing to Electric Pencil means not touching a thing within the Ghost blog platform. That is hard to resist.
• Limited keyboard support means writing without certain characters that come up in a modern context quite a lot, like
  [ ] { } \
• The default "overtype" mode definitely has an adjustment period to get through, and will surprise you with how often it deletes the first character of a line of text when all you wanted to do was insert a new line.
• Getting the data out isn't a horrible process, but adds enough friction to the process to make it frustrating in a rapid write-edit-publish cycle.
• The small amount of text on screen at one time makes it difficult to read and scan through long text to find specific passages for editing. If you're a visual editor, it's going to be a rough ride.
• This predates Unicode and software-based fonts, so no international writing!

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