Notepad Minus by unknown
Notepad Minus is the only text editor that has less functions than the original NOTEPAD.EXE that comes with Windows.
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Notepad Minus

Featured by Hans Bernhard [Ubermorgen & Etoyholding].

notepad minus [notepad-] is honest software "art" for the people. it is the historical standard text editor called notepad, just with even less functions than the original one shipped with microsoft windows. so this piece is straight code for the mass, for the consumer, even for the recipient. everybody understands it on a pure emotional level. no more words needed, just some comments: here we go again, notepad- is an even more ultra-simpler easy-to-use text editor than notepad, but it was never officially included in the standard microzoloft windows. a large number of tools have been designed to tackle the problem of editing structured text, particularly program source code. editors like Z [Woo81] and EMACS [Sta81] use lexical descriptions to provide some of the features of a syntax-directed editor while allowing the user to edit the program text in a freeform way, notepad- does not allow any of these functions. if inspected in global software art context, notepad- is 1024 times better than all "transform-blog-trackbags-in-realtime-into-video-signals" together, at least that's what drx said, the man who discovered notepad- for runme.org. per se notepad- does not qualify as "art". but due to the fact that this piece of code was archived, then discovered, uploaded, catalogued, stored and now featured -on the runme.org platform, the software art repository and at read_me, the software art conference- a new contextual step in the memetic evolution of notepad- was created. copies of this low-tech tool were taken out of the global geek context, injected into a cultural-intellectual environment and labeled with the broad & narrow term "art". this beautiful "object trouvee" was found by accident on some shareware site, most probably tucows. this formalist, trivial, manipulating, contemporary parody code is a piece of art of tomorrow totally forgotten and almost fully rotten. if it wasn't discovered in this whitespace of the software deep-sea, maybe 200 years later some archaeologist would have recovered it and it would later be exhibited as the one-and-only-super-old windows/microsoft text-editor in the digital historical museum in cairo. but as we know for sure, created by unknown it was probably an admin geek on an easy afternoon having a funny-worky day of finger-aerobic exercises with a dirty-boring smile in her face.

by hans bernhard, posted 14 Nov 2004


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