As a tiny note to writing with Microsoft's now ancient GW- 
BASIC, is a note that:  If your printer can print from DOS 
(most nowadays can't) you only need a command.com on a sys- 
ed floppy disk to write letters and memorandum and memo's.

                         Here's how

At the command prompt type the name of your desired file 
name preceeded by the words:  copy con.
('copy con' is dosspeak for "copy this file to the console"

then add your desired filename right after that, but be 
careful to not duplicate an existing file name so the old 
file doesn't get written over.  but that isn't much of a 
problem if you are just working from a sys-ed floppy.

Then after the 'copy con' add your file name.  So that your 
command looks something like these examples:
     copy con memo.txt
     copy con mother.doc
     copy con 12-23-84.mem
     copy con holidays.let

then type your letter just like you would on an old manual 
typewriter, pressing enter at the end of each line.
If i remember correctly, you can press the TAB key once or 
twice at the beginning of each line to create a left margin 
indent on your literary creation upon printout so you won't 
have a letter that starts on column 1 of your paper.

After you are finished writing your memo press the F6 
function key.  You will see a control z then.  After 
pressing the F6 key, press the enter key.  Voila, your 
letter is copied to the floppy or where ever you started 
your 'copy con' at.

Then to print your letter, (if your printer will work from 
DOS...) enter the command at the DOS prompt:

     copy YOURFILENAME prn

(that is dosspeak for send my document to the printer.)

Or you can use 'copy Filename LPT1
LPT is shorthand for 'lineprinter'.

That's it.  All there is tuit.  Grab an early ancient DOS 
book to read up on all the command.com goodies and tricks 
contained within.  Other existing command processors may 
have even more goodies contained within.  Check out 4DOS for 
example.

Wouldn't it have been nice if in the last century they had 
come up with a combination gw-basic and command.com all in 
one file?  or a pascal command.com or a Forth command.com.
i betcha one is out there s-o-m-e-w-h-e-r-e...
Then we could reduce the four files of the apocalypse to 
just three files of the apocalypse.  How simple can we make 
things and still get the basic job done?  Oh well... back to 
100 million lines of code in 100,000 files.
      Dear Mom,  how are you?...  Here is a movie of me...