I was in the US Navy and transferred from Chicago to San Diego for school. While I was waiting for my class to start, they put me in a clerk’s office to help with some seasonal stuff. That was my introduction to WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.
I’d never used WP before, but I had written a lot of programs. I figured out its nice macro language and scripted up my job. Our goal was to process 20 forms per person per day. My little experiment would let me do about 15 per hour. My coworkers loved it. Our boss found out and told us to keep our mouths shut, lest the powers that be load more work onto us.
I learned an awful lot about both word processing and corporate politics that month.
Unrelated to WordPerfect, but similar to your story: in my military service I served on signalling station (armored vehicle loaded with radios and antennas) and our job was to monitor the radios using a serial connection from a laptop, staring at a terminal output. Just look at the spew from the serial port, look at a few key numbers and take action (adjust antennas, bring up backup) if the numbers fall below a threshold.
These laptops were radiation hardened 486's running MS-DOS. And they had QBasic installed. And QBasic can interface with serial ports and play a loud beep on the laptop's PC speaker. Well you can guess the rest.
Unfortunately, just as I've had completed the program well enough so I could take a nap while on duty, I was transferred to another kind of command post vehicle that had Windows boxes with no qbasic and CO's seated in the same vehicle.
Amazing. When I was a student working at a provincial election main office I used code to automate my job and that of five of my fellow students. Learned similar lessons.
WordPerfect was a great word processor at its prime, that is, in the ms-dos days in the 80s and early 90s. I’d love to be able to use the dos version, the article describes the Mac version which I never used so it doesn’t trigger the nostalgia and technical awe factors (“wow they did all this in assembly in a 4-MHz IBM PC while these days word or google docs bring a fast modern pc to its knees”).
If you’re into the whole retro nostalgia thing, “almost perfect” is a great read about the rise, success and fall of WordPerfect corporation. (http://www.wordplace.com/ap/).
Fun story: My wife's grandfather was a salesman for WordPerfect back in the 1980s. He passed away roughly 15 years ago, but her grandmother still had a bunch of his stuff above her garage. When we were cleaning it out a couple years ago we found boxed/sealed sample copies of WordPerfect for every platform (Tandy/Apple II/DOS/etc.) all the way from the days when it was still published by SSI Software (version 1.x) up though 6.0 or so. There were also some dead-ended WordPerfect products (MathPerfect?), a bunch of branded WordPerfect conference swag (WordPerfect pocket calculators/mousepads/folios/etc.) and I think a couple quarterly sales reports and recruiting pamphlets. I tried to see if various computing museums wanted it, but nobody would take it. As far as I know it's still all sitting in a shed at my in-laws, can anybody think of something to do with it? It's ultimately destined for the dumpster, a younger me would have been appalled but at this point in my life I don't have the energy to worry about the detritus of a bygone corporation.
It does not describe the MacOS version. Its primary focus is the native Linux version. Did you stop reading after a couple of paragraphs, but still comment?
You make me wonder if I should have structured it differently. :-(
is this the word processor software that George RR Martin (and a few other authors) still uses on dos because modern alternative are all not good enough?
Robert Sawyer and George Martin are fans of WordStar. I supported it in the 1980s. It is a very clunky, awkward program by modern standards; that is why WordPerfect completely supplanted it.
It is not freeware. However, if you want to try it, there is a free clone:
http://wordtsar.ca/
According to your own link, the only version you can get for free is the last Mac version, and you can't run that without emulating the Mac, and you can't do that without a copy of MacOS 9 which isn't free.
The Linux version of 8.0 was available once as a free download, but it didn't come with redistribution rights. Just because something was once available for download for free doesn't mean you're allowed to keep making copies of it. Nobody's going to come after you if you pirate the formerly free download, of course, but nobody's probably going to come after you if you pirate it, period.
May I suggest that you read to the end of something before you comment?
To address your point about the Linux version:
I do not think that you are correct. Corel Corp, which is still alive and well, explicitly made a free version of the app and released it, along with a press release (which I link to). This has not been revoked or cancelled subsequently; the Linux version of the product was discontinued.
If someone makes a piece of software available for free, even if it's just a binary, then it remains free unless or until the company revokes that status. Corel has not revoked its status. Ergo, it remains freeware.
>If someone makes a piece of software available for free, even if it's just a binary, then it remains free unless or until the company revokes that status.
This is not in accordance with copyright law.
Corel granted permission to get copies from Corel. If you already have a copy from Corel, it remains free. But this isn't GPL; you don't have permission to make further copies of one of the free copies. If you get a copy from one of the third parties that still has it available for download, you're violating copyright, even if the third party themselves got their own copy for free.
Is it? I don't think Apple would sell you one right now. I kinda wish someone got sued over pirating abandonware, the company would most likely lose, and that would set a great precedent once and for all.
If that "company" owned the copyright, they would almost certainly win, but damages could be low or negligible negligible as long as the distributor wasn't selling the abandonware and as long as the suit was only for one copyrighted work. Attorneys' fees and costs could be a problem however. (US law, statutory damages, assuming the plaintiff couldn't get the jury outraged about giving away something that would otherwise bit rot.)
I'm a lawyer, but this is my meaningless drivel. It's not legal advice. You shouldn't listen to me. In fact, you shouldn't listen to anyone on HN about legal issues, ever. The copyright discussions here quickly devolve into complete nonsense. I've done software copyright for a long time, but I sometimes have to read posts five times to kind-of-sort-of-think I know what they're trying to argue. And it's almost always wrong.
(grishka, this is not an attack on you at all. Your post is fine.)
7.5.3 used to be downloadable from apple for free as abandonware, so you may be in luck. The website is gone, but wayback has the URLs. Start with [0] and edit the XXofYY for the rest. Getting a legal copy of the Macintosh ROM is what'll get ya.
I'm disappointed that the author forget about the WordPerfect Suite in Java [1]. That's the cool mid 90s running Java 1.0 on your beefy Pentium 133mhz desktop. You can still freely download and run it (it was unusably slow back then).
Never forget: by the end of the 90's, Corel bet highly on Linux. They ported software, contributed to wine and even had their own distro. By early 2000's microsoft bought some corel shares[0]. Soon after that, corel stopped contributing to wine, stopped new versions of their office suite for Linux and abandoned their distro.
Linux still has many problems on the desktop, but the failure of it achieving a significant fraction of this market can also be assigned to active sabotage from some external players.
Apple and Microsoft settled their GUI lawsuit of Mac vs. Windows with the investment of non-voting stock from Microsoft and the license of the Mac GUI by Microsoft.
The Amiga had bad management that tried to milk the same cow instead of innovate a new chipset to compete with everyone else. It seems like there is a curse on the Amiga for its companies.
Damn, early personal computer history always sounds so wild west-like and full of anticompetitive behaviour by microsoft. Crazy to think that apple were the good guys at some point.
SoftMaker Office is a good office suite that supports Linux, with HiDPI and all.
It also has a free version, FreeOffice. It does have some performance issues at times, but I find it better than LibreOffice overall.
Corel brought many quality software to Linux. Not only office software but also their graphics suite. And a Linux distro.
After the Microsoft deal, Corel continued publishing WordPerfect for other Unixes other than Linux. Corel never clarified why they started excluding Linux.
I bought some Corel stock back then, thinking that the company would somehow leverage its stewardship of WordPerfect to Linux dominance. This was back in the days when lawyers didn't trust Microsoft Word to count words reliably.
I eventually cut my losses, selling my $500-ish stake for $90 or so. So much for the year of Linux on the desktop. At least they didn't go the route of Caldera.
Serious question, slightly OT: Is there any good word processor today? I'm on Ubuntu so I don't know what the Windows or Mac worlds look like, but I hated Word both before and after the ribbon.
Open Office -> GoOffice -> Libre Office is cumbersome and nothing is intuitive. It has loads of bugs with newlines before and after tables. I had tens of bugs filed with them from the 2005-2010 era, but it seems that they've switched bug trackers two or three times and not taken the data with them.
I don't think this can be answered in general. What counts as a good word processor depends very much on what you're doing with it and on personal preferences. What texts are you writing?
For writing novels in German [1], I'm using Papyrus Author [2], which is superior to Word in most respects. But it's very expensive and they decided to make the English version even more expensive and subscription-based [3]. On the Mac, Scrivener also has a good reputation [4]. But these are tools for writing novels, most of their features are pointless for e.g. office work and technical writing.
Depending on what you do, you could just write in Pandoc markup [5] in a good text editor. As long as you accept the limitations and don't include any fancy LaTeX code with it, it will export your texts to just about any format. However, once you try to do anything beyond the simple markup, it opens a hell of incompatibilities with export backends and loses all of its advantages.
Hasn't there been a cultural change in how people write longer texts?
Office and other WYSIWYG applications is still very popular, but many today writes in some sort of markup language and then applies different templates.
Most important part IMHO is the spell checker, MS Word's has become quite advanced with grammar support etc. If I'm ever going to write anything in Word, it would be for the spell checker. But apart from that I prefer my writing in a text editor or something akin to that.
I experimented a bit with Writemonkey (Windows only) but I think Manuscript is somewhat similar
On the Mac I loved Nisus Writer [0] in the past. However, it's Word compatibility was limited, which is annoying if your company uses Word for internal documents. It's fine for RTF documents though.
Perhaps these days the Word compatibility is better, but I'd wager it will never be 100% compatible with Word.
TeXmacs (https://www.texmacs.org/), which is a document preparation system, may be taken into consideration as a word processor too; its main editing mode is WYSIWYG and its operation by default can be menu-driven.
It's WordPerfect. Distributed on 9-track tape. In German.
Back then, companies made an effort to support as many people as possible. I remember Infocom simultaneously publishing its games for Atari, Amiga, and PDP-11 machines.
Today, if you're not Mac or Windows, you're an "edge case" and not worthy of the effort.
> Back then, companies made an effort to support as many people as possible.
Companies pretty much had to make an effort to support as many people as possible back then. It wasn't until the early to mid 1990's that Windows became the dominant platform. Even though MS-DOS had a huge market share before Windows, other platforms had enough of a presence in homes and industry to justify cross-platform support. (And more important during the end of the DOS era, no one really knew how the future would turn out even though it was unlikely that DOS would be a part of it.)
Readit News
I’d never used WP before, but I had written a lot of programs. I figured out its nice macro language and scripted up my job. Our goal was to process 20 forms per person per day. My little experiment would let me do about 15 per hour. My coworkers loved it. Our boss found out and told us to keep our mouths shut, lest the powers that be load more work onto us.
I learned an awful lot about both word processing and corporate politics that month.
These laptops were radiation hardened 486's running MS-DOS. And they had QBasic installed. And QBasic can interface with serial ports and play a loud beep on the laptop's PC speaker. Well you can guess the rest.
Unfortunately, just as I've had completed the program well enough so I could take a nap while on duty, I was transferred to another kind of command post vehicle that had Windows boxes with no qbasic and CO's seated in the same vehicle.
If you’re into the whole retro nostalgia thing, “almost perfect” is a great read about the rise, success and fall of WordPerfect corporation. (http://www.wordplace.com/ap/).
It does not describe the MacOS version. Its primary focus is the native Linux version. Did you stop reading after a couple of paragraphs, but still comment?
You make me wonder if I should have structured it differently. :-(
If you want spreadsheets as well, Corel 1-2-3 works under dosemu at least (see https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/lotus123.html).
I link to that site several times in the blog post – but I also explicitly point out that the DOS version is _not_ freeware.
There is no such thing as Corel 1-2-3 and never was. IBM owns Lotus 1-2-3. It too is not free and never was, but you can run AsEasyAs for nothing.
http://www.triusinc.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10
Deleted Comment
Robert Sawyer and George Martin are fans of WordStar. I supported it in the 1980s. It is a very clunky, awkward program by modern standards; that is why WordPerfect completely supplanted it.
It is not freeware. However, if you want to try it, there is a free clone: http://wordtsar.ca/
According to your own link, the only version you can get for free is the last Mac version, and you can't run that without emulating the Mac, and you can't do that without a copy of MacOS 9 which isn't free.
The Linux version of 8.0 was available once as a free download, but it didn't come with redistribution rights. Just because something was once available for download for free doesn't mean you're allowed to keep making copies of it. Nobody's going to come after you if you pirate the formerly free download, of course, but nobody's probably going to come after you if you pirate it, period.
May I suggest that you read to the end of something before you comment?
To address your point about the Linux version:
I do not think that you are correct. Corel Corp, which is still alive and well, explicitly made a free version of the app and released it, along with a press release (which I link to). This has not been revoked or cancelled subsequently; the Linux version of the product was discontinued.
If someone makes a piece of software available for free, even if it's just a binary, then it remains free unless or until the company revokes that status. Corel has not revoked its status. Ergo, it remains freeware.
This is not in accordance with copyright law.
Corel granted permission to get copies from Corel. If you already have a copy from Corel, it remains free. But this isn't GPL; you don't have permission to make further copies of one of the free copies. If you get a copy from one of the third parties that still has it available for download, you're violating copyright, even if the third party themselves got their own copy for free.
" Corel offered both a free edition with fewer bundled fonts, as well as a paid version." as it is at the end of a paragraph.
Maybe put this either on a new line to draw more attention to it or add a title just underneath it?
Like:
"That's right, Corel released a FREE edition"
Is it? I don't think Apple would sell you one right now. I kinda wish someone got sued over pirating abandonware, the company would most likely lose, and that would set a great precedent once and for all.
I'm a lawyer, but this is my meaningless drivel. It's not legal advice. You shouldn't listen to me. In fact, you shouldn't listen to anyone on HN about legal issues, ever. The copyright discussions here quickly devolve into complete nonsense. I've done software copyright for a long time, but I sometimes have to read posts five times to kind-of-sort-of-think I know what they're trying to argue. And it's almost always wrong.
(grishka, this is not an attack on you at all. Your post is fine.)
[0] https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof...
Deleted Comment
[1] http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Corel_Office_for_Java
It's a fair cop! I did totally forget about that. I will grab a copy and give it a try -- thank you!
Linux still has many problems on the desktop, but the failure of it achieving a significant fraction of this market can also be assigned to active sabotage from some external players.
[0] https://slashdot.org/story/00/10/02/220238/microsoft-buys-in...
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3288
http://www.netwinder.org/about.html
I specifically mentioned the NetWinder in the blogpost and gave those 2 links to it.
Ironically Microsoft also saved Apple b/c the Government was breathing down their neck with Antitrust litigation at the time.
The Amiga had bad management that tried to milk the same cow instead of innovate a new chipset to compete with everyone else. It seems like there is a curse on the Amiga for its companies.
It also has a free version, FreeOffice. It does have some performance issues at times, but I find it better than LibreOffice overall.
Corel brought many quality software to Linux. Not only office software but also their graphics suite. And a Linux distro.
After the Microsoft deal, Corel continued publishing WordPerfect for other Unixes other than Linux. Corel never clarified why they started excluding Linux.
I eventually cut my losses, selling my $500-ish stake for $90 or so. So much for the year of Linux on the desktop. At least they didn't go the route of Caldera.
Open Office -> GoOffice -> Libre Office is cumbersome and nothing is intuitive. It has loads of bugs with newlines before and after tables. I had tens of bugs filed with them from the 2005-2010 era, but it seems that they've switched bug trackers two or three times and not taken the data with them.
For writing novels in German [1], I'm using Papyrus Author [2], which is superior to Word in most respects. But it's very expensive and they decided to make the English version even more expensive and subscription-based [3]. On the Mac, Scrivener also has a good reputation [4]. But these are tools for writing novels, most of their features are pointless for e.g. office work and technical writing.
Depending on what you do, you could just write in Pandoc markup [5] in a good text editor. As long as you accept the limitations and don't include any fancy LaTeX code with it, it will export your texts to just about any format. However, once you try to do anything beyond the simple markup, it opens a hell of incompatibilities with export backends and loses all of its advantages.
[1] https://talumriel.de [2] https://www.papyrus.de/ [3] https://www.papyrusauthor.com/ [4] https://www.literatureandlatte.com [5] https://pandoc.org/
Office and other WYSIWYG applications is still very popular, but many today writes in some sort of markup language and then applies different templates.
Most important part IMHO is the spell checker, MS Word's has become quite advanced with grammar support etc. If I'm ever going to write anything in Word, it would be for the spell checker. But apart from that I prefer my writing in a text editor or something akin to that.
I experimented a bit with Writemonkey (Windows only) but I think Manuscript is somewhat similar
http://www.theologeek.ch/manuskript/
Perhaps these days the Word compatibility is better, but I'd wager it will never be 100% compatible with Word.
---
[0]: https://www.nisus.com/pro/
I haven't tried it, but it looks interesting. At least, I like the idea of basing it on a custom version of Markdown.
It's WordPerfect. Distributed on 9-track tape. In German.
Back then, companies made an effort to support as many people as possible. I remember Infocom simultaneously publishing its games for Atari, Amiga, and PDP-11 machines.
Today, if you're not Mac or Windows, you're an "edge case" and not worthy of the effort.
Companies pretty much had to make an effort to support as many people as possible back then. It wasn't until the early to mid 1990's that Windows became the dominant platform. Even though MS-DOS had a huge market share before Windows, other platforms had enough of a presence in homes and industry to justify cross-platform support. (And more important during the end of the DOS era, no one really knew how the future would turn out even though it was unlikely that DOS would be a part of it.)