Have you ever moved your cursor and started typing, only to find out that suddenly you were typing in BOLD? That's due to some bold code left behind from earlier in the edit. In WordPerfect you could press F11 to Reveal all the Codes, delete the bold code, and move on with your day.
Word 2003 still works and has an update available to support modern OOXML docs. My biggest gripe is the way Ribbonized Word has destroyed the classic Normal layout view and made Draft mode less capable.
Most people – me included – reckoned that Word 5.1 for the Mac was the last, best version.
If you grab the ShapeShifter VM that I describe and link to in the blog post, and look in the MS Word folder, you may be in for a very pleasant surprise. :-)
Thank you, I forgot Word had that feature. If I remember correctly, it's not nearly as powerful as Reveal Codes -- it's like setting :li in vim to see whitespace marks. Reveal Codes shows you _all_ the codes (imagine HTML or SGML but with square brackets).
A completely different feature. In word this should be called "reveal spaces and line breaks".
In WordPerfect this is activating a TeX mode in addition to your WYSIWYG. You have two buffers, with two coursers, that stay in sync. Maybe the closes analogy is a jupyter notepad for tex? But fast.
I have never seen anything like this, althou LyX offers one mode that is kind of a mix of both of them.
Reveal codes is the ultimate hammer against screwy formatting. No more wondering why your layout went screwy 10 pages away from where you made some minor change to your text, a graphic, or a table. With "reveal codes" available, you can see directly what's going on and fix it right, instead of fumbling about with the formatting tools in Word.
I think this is part of the appeal of Markdown-based editors. The nicer ones can make the text look good both while typing and when exporting, but there's little to no hidden magic. WordPerfect, XyWrite/Nota Bene, and WordStar had -- and still have -- fans who insist that they were unparalleled at "just sit down and write"; good Markdown editors bring a lot of that back.
(And no, Markdown isn't, on its own, a replacement for a full-blown word processor, LaTeX, or the like. Many classes of documents just aren't that complicated, though.)
Yes, although I've found these tend to be apps people have strong opinions about. :)
Currently, I use Ulysses for big documents (like multi-chapter stories) as well as for blog posts, since it can publish directly to WordPress, Ghost, Micro.blog, and Medium. It's a little idiosyncratic, and it's for Mac, iOS only.
A very similar app that's for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android is iA Writer. It's also idiosyncratic, but has slightly different pluses and minuses. I used it before Ulysses, though, and might yet go back.
For shorter stuff I tend to write in Drafts, although that's another Mac/iOS thing.
Since I'm obviously a Mac user, I don't know a lot about what's available on Linux other than code editors, which personally I haven't found that I like as much for prose. Definitely a YMMV thing. Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code both have decent Markdown modes and have various extensions to do interesting things, though, like Markdown linting. Emacs and Vim both actually have great Markdown modes, too, but I just don't like either one for prose.
If you work across platforms, and if you don't mind Microsoft stuff, then Visual Studio Code both syntax highlights Markdown and also offers a good live preview.
It's a little bloated, but is surprisingly fast - unless you load it down with extensions.
It depends on what you mean by "better." :) The problem is they're not exactly the same thing: Groff (and LaTeX) are much closer in spirit to HTML than they are to Markdown, in that they're the final format you're going to use to render the final product. Markdown, though, was always intended as an intermediate format that you'd run through a processor to produce HTML. It's not as capable as HTML (or LaTeX or...) because it wasn't ever meant to be; it's supposed to cover the basics. MOM has macros for pairwise kerning, horizontal and vertical movements, and precisely-measured horizontal rules; those are things that are way outside Markdown's scopes.
As for whether or not MOM is easier than Markdown for "first draft" writing, though? To pull just a single bit out of a FAQ that I wrote recently, in Markdown I wrote:
**That's pretty cool! What about, uh, not movie theaters?**
The home version of Atmos works _essentially_ the same way, just
mapping to fewer speakers---typically just five, although you can
get fancy and go up to eleven.
From what I see, in MOM, that would become:
\*[BD]That's pretty cool! What about, uh, not movie
theaters?\*[PREV]
The home version of Atmos works \*[IT]essentially\*[PREV] the same
way, just mapping to fewer speakers\[EM]typically just five,
although you can get fancy and go up to eleven.
So when it comes to ease of writing, the thing Markdown was specifically aimed at, I'm gonna say it definitely has the edge. If I was going to typeset a book in Groff, I'd be down for writing a Markdown-to-MOM translator, which seems like it'd probably be pretty easy. But I wouldn't start out drafting in MOM any more than I'd start out drafting in LaTeX. Or HTML.
One of unresolved questions of rich text in my mind is what to do with these markup “codes”, explicit or hidden, because while the (usually) nested open/close structure is a non-terrible way for describing formatting in plain text, it is IMO a completely unnatural model (mental or programmatic) of describing rich text by itself, not backed by marked-up plain text. This is apparent in abstraction leaks like the one you describe, but it also has a way of making your life really miserable as soon as you want to reason about transformations of documents, like in a collaborative editor or just a HTML-based editor.
In fact, both Google Wave (IIRC, not going to look up the reference right now) and the Medium editor (https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-1...) represent inline formatting as a bucket of non-nested “spans”, because while this still doesn’t yield a unique representation of what you want to call rich text, it gets much easier to pick a canonical representative for each class of equivalent representations that doesn’t get completely upturned by localized editing operations.
Even the text editor example in the GoF book just assigned each character a (shared, CoW) style object... Does anyone actually do it this way?
The complication arises when you insert text: Users generally prefer to insert a letter between two bold characters and have the word processor "assume" the user meant to type boldface, rather than push a button to put the insert-function into "create bold letters" mode.
Fantastic feature and it's hard for me to believe how it's missed in all the other editors. Somehow, there must be an underlying structure to store all that formatting - so it's strange that there isn't some way to at least have a look at it.
The WordPerfect file format is basically a long stream of bytes representing the text, with special control codes inserted for switching various features on and off.
In other words (IIRC) reveal codes was made possible largely because the file system representation matched what you saw on screen, so it was easy to keep the visual representation in sync with the file. In Word (certainly now and I think back then as well) it wasn't that way - the file was structured so there was a mis-match between the screen and the file, so keeping the two aspects in sync became more difficult as the in-memory representation was correspondingly structured rather than sequential.
There's a lot of tech nostalgia for old software. Just for fun is plenty reason enough. I also bet there are people out there who prefer it. I wonder if it is snappier than Word? I just opened MS Word on a recent Mac and it took 5-7 seconds to open to a blank document, including requiring me to choose an option and click through first. Just saying.
WP is and was wicked fast, and the blank screen, distraction free ui is amazing, the macro language is very powerful also.
There were law firms that used it well into the late 90s due to the amazing macros they had going. Think of the complicated Excel macros one hears about. Same thing, only with law firms and lawyers.
There are still people who run wordstar (which WP supplanted in the eighties).
I wouldn’t use it now, but is was an amazing product in its day.
There is similar modern software as well.. no need to revert to an unmaintained program just to get something that may be a little faster than a full office suite.
No one is saying that you should. But very few word processors today are anything close to as fast. Maybe abiword. Certainly not google docs or Microsoft word.
I haven’t used it, but unless it’s macro language is about as powerful as excel’s, and unless it has no detectable latency at all, it isn’t as good in that department at least.
I still occasionally use WordPerfect on my PS/2 when I want to get serious writing done. I don't have any multitasking set up, just plain DOS, so no internet or other distractions to occupy my time.
(and even if I could multitask, I doubt a 386SX is fast enough to handle an SSL handshake these days)
You must have missed the thread the other day about open source video games that used to be commercial. Psychology departments can run experiments on people where they see what the effect of using Word Perfect is, or otherwise use it as a learning task.
So, for example, you can try to design the fastest learning protocol for a given set of functionality being acquired by 90% of subjects. It's fairly safe to assume that most college students don't know Word Perfect, so you should be able to get good results doing A/B testing.
You could do experiments like: do people learn Word Perfect faster if they take a 30 minute nap beforehand? Do they learn worse if they do 30 minutes of intense exercise beforehand?
It's just ordinary newspaper-style writing in a shock jock style. (Insert stock joke about Milgram experiment.) I think it goes back to Bolshevism and especially the "talk hard" ethos of Pump Up the Volume. Hip-hop and rap are other influences.
Also, from an art point of view, I just like the idea of recontextualizing the computer as a device in a psychology experiment. The games you can play with this idea are pretty weird. For example: would you conduct a psychological experiment that attempts to get people better at rationalizing, and risks turning the subjects into monsters capable of rationalizing the decision to perform progressively more grotesque modifications of their body, apparently enhancing their abilities, in the style of Iron Man?
I really don't advise getting attached to lines in somebody else's database. HN is more or less a social data harvesting system. What I'm doing is bad, very bad in the sense of the Bolsheviks. It's a style of revolution, a gestalt, a zeitgeist, a poetic renaissance if you will, the par excellence of lyric expression. So what if my style is dissociated press mixed with psychological mad scientist? Strange internet persona is not mentioned in any of the rules, and this place could use some imagination, or perhaps I should says psychedelicality?
Oh dear. Please don't tell me you're uneducated. I'm so sorry.
Look, I buy weed from the cocaine cartel in [REDACTED]. The local police pay no attention to them, zilch. You know why? Those guys are professionals, and they have nowhere to go. They're stuck. Moreover, it is common knowledge that the CIA controls the drug trade.
These guys are basically baby sitters for drug addicts.
You have nowhere to go. Your nurturing instincts are taking over, and I'm turning this into a historical moment, making this comment the spark that ignites the revolution!
Who makes a bot that goes on message boards and tells people that cocaine cartels have nurturing instincts? Ha!
Yeeaaaah, that is definitely hitting uncanny valley territory for me. Thing is, some of the comments it's making in other threads seem pretty germane, while others are really bizarre.
Is there a hacker news equivalent of the ole shoe on head test? I'm curious if there is someone adding real comments sporadically to throw folks off.
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.
The calculators sold pretty well, but the boxed software is pretty heavy and only appeals to a very specific audience. I think I found a few examples of auctions that ended without a single bid and figured it wasn't worth the trouble. I would be surprised if got many bids, but I guess I could give it a shot.
Maybe a lot of effort for little reward here, but you could always try contacting someone like LGR[1] and offer to send some for the purposes of making a video to show some of them off being unboxed and then used on their original hardware. In some senses, that might be about as good as sending it to a museum!
I collect boxed software. I wasn't aware of your auction. In some ways auctions work against a product like this because this is an impulse buy now item. I would repost an auction now that hw is aware.
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/
It was a very common UI once -- now the Joe editor offers it, but I think the CP/M version of Borland Turbo Pascal had the same.
I tend to agree with you. WordStar came before WYSIWYG or proportional-font printing, and it never really adapted to those things. By comparison, WordPerfect was a master of getting the absolute best out of any printer you might have -- its printer support was legendarily good.
Corel did sell a clone of 1-2-3 (Quattro Pro) as part of their suite. In my opinion it was far superior, at least for how I used it in middle school, though I'm sure some diehard 1-2-3 users would disagree.
It's a bit harsh to Quattro Pro to call it a 1-2-3 clone! 8-)
It's a complete DOS spreadsheet in its own right, and a very good one at that. Quattro is the spreadsheet that introduced the feature of highlighting a range, then dragging the corner of the range and the program extrapolates the data and fills in the extra cells -- a very handy function indeed IMHO.
There were a bunch of DOS spreadsheets -- Lotus 1-2-3 was _the_ killer app that led the IBM PC to greatness and created the modern computer industry. VisiCalc for the Apple ][ created spreadsheets and improved the lives of tens of thousands of accountants and executives, but 1-2-3 took that concept and made it far more powerful. The name denotes that it integrates the three key functions of [1] spreadsheeting, [2] generating charts, and [3] building and querying simple databases.
IMHO probably the best value commercial spreadsheet for DOS was Computer Associates' Supercalc 5, which was $49 at the end of its life and a very capable, fully-3D program.
And of course there was Microsoft Multiplan, later combined with Microsoft Chart and wrapped in a GUI to create Microsoft's pioneering first Mac app, called Excel.
But if you knew 1-2-3, then AsEasyAs was a direct copy and the subject of a copy-and-feel lawsuit at the time. It's officially discontinued but as it was shareware it was always free to download and use, and it still is today.
The Borland Quattro Pro for Windows (QPW) development is one of the most remarkable organizations, processes, and development cultures we have encountered in the AT&T Bell Laboratories Pasteur process research project. The project assimilated requirements, completed design and implementation of 1 million lines of code, and completed testing in 31 months. Coding was done by no more than eight people at a time, which means that individual coding productivity was higher than 1000 lines of code per staff-week. The project capitalized on its small size by centering development activities around daily meetings where architecture, design, and interface issues were socialized. Quality assurance and project management roles were central to the development sociology, in contrast to the developer-centric software production most often observed in our studies of AT&T telecommunications software. Analyses of the development process are ‘‘off the charts’’ relative to most other processes we have studied.
Sadly, I've not yet worked at an org quite this competent, functional, productive. Looking back, it seems this was the high water mark for methodologies, maturity models, software quality assurance, etc.
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. :-(
Might as well ask here, at the risk of being off-topic:
Is this possible for Professional Write?
I have some old files I found when I was going through my floppies, and I can't open them because they're binaries. I did some digging at the time and couldn't find a copy of any kind, let alone a legit one. Any leads would be appreciated.
"We apologize, the Instant Online File Conversion Service is unavailable until further notice"
FileMerlin looks like a good recommendation, but I'm too cheap for that!
I tried following the corporate rabbit trail, from the most generically named "Software Publishing Corporation" to Allegro New Media, then Vizacom, then it either stayed with them or the IP moved to Serif.
Running the Windows version is a little bit more complicated. You will need winevdm (windows 3.x emulator)[1]. Download the unstable version, stable is extremely outdated. You can use ImDisk Toolkit[2] to mount the floppies. Unfortunately the installer doesn't seem to work on winevdm, so you will have to manually extract all the .zip files to the same directory and run PWPLUS.EXE from there.
Wordperfect had a god-awful learning curve.
Especially if you were coming from Wordstar.
However, back in the days of yore in Jamaica, pretty much every office and law firm that had an IBM-PC had Wordperfect on it.
The secretaries (yes!) back then were goddesses in every key combination, formatting tricks and ways how to print the document exactly how they wanted it.
However, it's not even close to VIM for casual text editing.
Well, yes, this is somewhat true. I went through the pain of that learning curve in about 1989.
But WordPerfect got a lot better after v5 when they introduced CUA-style drop-down menus. After that you could explore and slowly learn the program and just use the F-key combinations you most needed as accelerators.
The Linux, Mac and Windows versions are perfectly standard GUI apps and are no harder to learn or use than any other GUI apps. They're also very fast on modern kit.
Is there a reason for that? I grew up in my mom's law office and one of the first programs I have any memory of is me making shapes, dinosaur mouths in my mind, in word perfect by banging letters and new lines on the keyboard, well before I could read.
I remember getting older and my mom being annoyed that Wordperfect seemed to be on it's way out and how much more awful Word was
I supported WordPerfect for various law practices in the courts around Chancery Lane in London well into the MS Office era.
The main reason was not templates; it was the word-count function.
MS Word has a very odd implementation of features like headers and footers, footnotes, tables of contents etc. It considers them separate areas of the document, and so when you do a word count, they are not included.
For authors who are paid by the book, this isn't very important. For journalists, who aren't paid for headers and footers, only raw ASCII text excluding such things, it's almost good.
But for lawyers, who are paid a lot of money -- far more than journos or authors -- for everysingleword, it matters a lot. WordPerfect counts every damned word, wherever it is, whatever region of the document it's in -- so they get paid for all the words the client received.
This could well be a difference of thousands of pounds/dollars/euros/whatever.
For that, a single copy of WordPerfect at £150-£250 could well pay for itself by the first document you sent out.
Because law firm templates were written in Word Perfect macros. I still know law firms that use Word Perfect 5.x and Windows 95. If it isn't broken why fix it?
I used to have an academic version of Word Perfect 5.1 that worked like the commercial version only in printing out it would print asterisks on the printout. It was free and good for editing.
I had a boss back in early 00's that insisted on WordPerfect (even though it was already dying). So I learned it and never learned Word quite as well. (Mostly because I never took another job that required knowing an office suite well).
Back when I was in elementary school, my favorite feature of Word Perfect was that it had a keyboard shortcut for opening a DOS command prompt. This allowed us to play hidden games after we finished our work without having to wait for the computer lab supervisor.
I first used Word Perfect on a Data General MV/8000. Before the company changed its name to WP Corp. they were known as Satellite Software of Orem UT. WP became preferred in law offices due to features peculiar to legal documents,such as "Table of Authorities".
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.
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.
Workers' pay rates have barely risen over the last 40 years, while the C-suite have risen by hundreds of percentage points.
Remember, minimal wage = minimal effort.
It is different situation if you are working a summer job and going to Harvard or Stanford or any university, and work real hard in minimum wage job, because when you graduate, you will be earning hundreds of thousands of dollars. But for people who are stuck at the $7.25 federal minimum wage to $10 or $12 for life because they have a high school education and that's all they have going for them, don't expect them to think about it the same way that you think about it.
So the actual increase was 24.6% over 35 years assuming 2019 wasn’t some outlying peak and 1984 wasn’t an unusually bad year. We can check 1984 by going another 20 years to 1964 and the median household income was 6,600 which is $54,430.20 in 2019 or an increase of 26.2% in 55 years. Can’t prove 2019 is also an outlier, but that “40%” increase in 10 years suggests it likely is.
PS: And yes end years matter. Inflation adjusted median household income increased form 1964 to 2009 by 6.6% in 45 years. Perhaps things have fundamentally changed in the last 10 years, but it’s not likely.
the people stuck in minimum wage jobs long term are those who have no interest in creating value (just keep doing it the hard way). This attitude is a great way to get stuck at minimum wage forever.
There are people that simply are not capable. Not because of desire or attitude, but because of IQ, resources, connections, training, etc.
And, there's only 1000 CEO's at the Fortune 1000. There are 330 million Americans, not all of them can be CEO of a Fortune 1000. If you do the math, 1000 / 330000000 = 0.000003 of US citizens will become CEO of a Fortune 1000 company. This is a metaphor, by the way. What I am saying is that it is a zero sum game and there are only so many high paying wages to go around.
For example, Walmart has 2.3 million workers. How would they all make $120,000 per year, if they all, as you say, have total interest in creating value? Never. It will never happen. What would you say if you were the store manager, or district manager, or regional manager of Walmart and every single employee came up to YOU and said, "Hey, I want to create value at Walmart, and want to earn $120,000 per year. What do we all need to do?" And nobody wants to be the door greeter, nobody wants to be the cashier, but every single one wants to be the store manager? And you cannot find one single person that wants to be cashier, they all want to be store manager? Walmart would all of a sudden have 0 employees, and then 0 customers because they would be out of business.
You see, you and most people reading these remarks are in rarified company. Smart. Talented. Capable. Someone who graduates from Harvard or Standford or MIT literally has the world at their feet and can literally almost do anything they set their mind to. Because they have the actual IQ and resources, and connections to do so. But there's only so many spots open every year at elite schools, and 99.99999999% of the USA or world will never, ever get a whiff of those schools. But not everyone is that way. You'll never get someone who has Down's Syndrome to run a Fortune 1000 company, and I'm not being down on those with Downs. It's just reality.
Another example: If you are raised on the south side of Chicago, in the baddest part of town, and if you're raised down there, you better just beware, that you'll run into Leroy Brown and he will put you and your peers to work selling crack cocaine and you will never, never, never get into Harvard, except for some very rare outlier. And you will think it is normal because you didn't grow up white in Los Altos Hills or Atherton, CA where you learned completely different things growing up. I'm sure that NOBODY reading this would want to change places with a black boy or girl growing up in south Chicago.
This is about the US Navy, the stakeholders are the citizens of the United States. This is not a for-profit venture deapite popular opinion the military doesn't really profit from war (even though politicians might).
It's funny. If business/politicians promote an atmosphere of distrust between workers and work-givers in a society, then the consequence is an atmosphere of distrust between workers and work-givers in a society. People in positions of authority and power who want to foster trust need to make the first move.
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.
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.
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.
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.
True but they had the schematics of Jay Miner's chips. Apple Mac and Windows PC passed Amiga sound and video standards and a new chipset was needed to compete with them.
In fact they were working on a new chipset when Commodore went bankrupt. Had they started earlier on it, it might have saved the company, that and the Commodore 65.
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.
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.
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.)
It's not trivial to install a 20-year-old program on a modern distro
Meanwhile I have some mid-90s Win32 apps that still work fine on Windows 10, and a bunch of miscellaneous DOS utilities from the 80s that are just as functional. Of course, the same applies to those versions of WordPerfect. As much as people like to talk about "DLL hell" on Windows, the dependency problem seems far worse on Linux. I know of some very expensive software (IC design/EDA) that's very difficult to get running on anything but a specific minor version of a specific distro.
> the dependency problem seems far worse on Linux.
Mostly fixed by containers, which the solution proposed here, and other new technologies like flatpaks, snaps and appimages. It is sad we have no unique ultimate solution for the problem, but yes it is mostly solved nowadays.
Exactly, yes. I do not know how easy it would be to create a container with an old 32-bit version of Ubuntu, Debian or even Fedora, one old enough to run WordPerfect 8 well. But if someone could do it, the app could be packaged as a Snap or a Flatpak and in theory it would work on any modern x86 distro. I'd like that very much.
Do people still gripe about DLLs? I remember them being confusing and problematic 25 years ago when downloads and disk space were expensive, so apps tended to not ship with the DLLs they depend on. I haven't worried about DLL dependency or compatibility in at least a decade, maybe more, expect when trying to get a Windows app to run under Wine.
This is not an useful comparison. I also have some 25 year old utilities that will still run on my current desktop Linux (and the source will build on practically any operating system).
What does this say about trying to run a 25 year old office suite? Have you tried running word 4.0 on windows 10 lately? Will it print?
It gets really bad once you need to support a libc5/a.out executable.
Linux never cared that much. If you're living in an open source world, binary compatibility isn't seen as important. At least that was my impression in the early days, but even now the corporations don't seem to care as much because desktop applications and other binary blobs don't target Linux as much. And for the server-side stuff, you've got containers or VMs.
I would bet that some gamers would cry out if a future revision would derive them of their Steam bloabs.
On the technical side, I do wonder how Windows pulls it all of. Sure, there's more API stability and often fewer external libraries, but there are also the compatibility modes you can set and probably some hidden stuff that you don't have to switch on manually. Wouldn't even be surprised if Windows itself would do a similar thing like GPU drivers and fix some compatibility problems for well-known applications ("I see this is Winword 2.0, so let's work around an allocator bug").
> Wouldn't even be surprised if Windows itself would do a similar thing like GPU drivers and fix some compatibility problems for well-known applications
Raymond Chen (Microsoft) wrote a book about it all, and runs a blog which mentions instances too - sorry, I don't have the links to hand, but he is easily found.
For important stuff like SimCity and Doom for example the Windows developers tested those apps to find any issues, debugged them, and actually made Windows change its behaviour depending upon the app that was running.
It didn't even matter that a bug was down to a game using undocumented features as the team knew Windows would still get the blame from the public/press for it not running, so it became necessary to make sure they worked even if Windows itself had to have per-program hacks added.
I wonder if flatpak will (hopefully) become the standard for linux apps in one or two years time, and if in 20 years we'll just be able to go back and install the flatpaks and have solved that problem.
Valve seems to be betting on it, as Steam on Linux seems to use runtimes that are very similar to flatpaks.
I am 100% sure that this will not be the case. In my experience static linked binaries from a couple decades ago are _harder_ to run, not easier. Or at least much harder to fix once any of the pieces is broken.
Oh right, I forgot that the libraries themselves still need to run on the host system. Can that ever be a problem for binaries? Will flatpaks start bundling python 2.x at some point?
Some old Windows software still works well on Win10, while a lot of old Windows software does not. Some old Linux software is pretty easy to get running on a modern system, while some of it is not.
If my memory serves correctly, revenue from CorelDraw also began to decrease around that time. The market underwent a recession after the dot com boom turned into a bust, and a lot of companies that had been flush with cash had to cancel projects that were not essential to their core business.
It's quite sad. WordPerfect was a product I used a lot in the 1990s. LibreOffice and Word drives me nuts these days as so many things with the document model just don't make sense, whereas WordPerfect 5.1 and reveal codes made it easy to delete stray formatting codes to get the desired results.
WordPerfect Corp screwed up twice over, and it's a minor miracle any of it survived.
First, it bought into the hype and spent a lot of effort porting WP to OS/2 -- then OS/2 bombed, of course.
It subsequently did a Windows version, but the first version was not a very good Windows app. The company spent a huge amount of effort on bringing across its own industry-best printer-driver system... but Windows already provided that, so it was largely a wasted effort.
(WP had fantastic printer support and could really get the absolute best out of any printer's capabilities. Windows just ignored all that, and dumped a bitmap of the page to the printer in graphics mode. Terrible on a dot-matrix or early inkjet, but it did get you all the fancy fonts and so on. But when Windows 3.1 included its own TrueType font rendering system, and as the market moved to hires bubblejets and lasers, it was the way to go.)
WordPerfect for Windows did evolve into a very good app, in time. I wish I'd bought a legit version when it was part of the Remote Worker's Humble Bundle last year. :-(
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.
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.)
Just a curious question. What are you supposed to do, legally, if you need a piece of software that is no longer sold by its developer? And you need a particular old version because that's what your hardware is capable of running. Are you supposed to just pretend that artificial scarcity is a thing and accept "you can't get it" as the answer? And can Apple really accuse you of pirating OS9 because you're supposed to download macOS Big Sur instead?
(I'm not from US, and I only have a very vague idea about how the US legal system works)
"Artificial scarcity" is indeed a thing - the author of software or a book or whatever has exclusive rights to authorize making copies, and if they choose not to authorize any (more) copies, then the legal answer is indeed that you can't get it. They can make a limited print run, they can make a time-limited offer, and they're also free to authorize just one or ten or no copies ever, and that's their right to choose so. Compensation to authors is essentially just a side-effect, the core copy-right is the right to control most (there are exceptions) making of copies.
But that's not really related to US legal system or 'western countries', the core principles of copyright are the same almost universally across the globe - here's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention#/media/File:B... a map of Berne convention signatories, there are just a few countries where that doesn't apply. The strictness and likelihood of enforcement of those laws varies a lot, though.
Apple can absolutely accuse you of pirating something it doesn't want to sell. The real question is whether they will spend the time or money to do anything about it. The answer is complicated. In your scenario, Apple will technically "win" without question. But it might be a phyrric victory because a jury may well agree with your reasoning and refuse to award any substantial damages. In fact, Apple might be shooting itself in the foot if the lack of damages encouraged other would-be "pirates." Apple would also risk bad PR, the Streisand effect, and have to spend a lot of money upfront on attorney fees and costs.
Note that under the law of some countries the right not to distribute a copyrighted work is viewed as a sort of natural or "moral" right to control one's creation. The US doesn't generally take that view; we think of copyright and copyright damages mostly in economic terms. Thus, if your "pirating" isn't actually doing economic harm to the rightsholder, you're somewhat unlikely to owe massive damages. Countries with more moralistic copyright regimes may have stiffer penalties in your scenario.
You might have some pity for Apple in your scenario (I do) because the law strongly encourages rights holders to bring a lawsuit in order to protect their rights. It's a use-it-or-you-might-lose-it-to-some-unknown-extent scenario, and lawyers and companies hate uncertainty. This can lead companies sue for copyright violations even when they don't really care. For example, a book's and publishing house probably don't care about a fanfiction blog. They may even like fanfiction because it's grassroots promotion of their product. But they may still feel forced to sue to stop fanfiction so that their rights aren't questioned the next time they need to sue, e.g., a bootlegger that's passing off unlicensed copies of their product as the real thing on Amazon.
On a more positive note, I like TFA because it highlights a company that did The Right Thing. WordPerfect made its Mac product (WordPerfect 3.5e) freely available when it stopped selling Mac software. WordPerfect 3.5e was released in a responsible way too (IIRC) by creating a special freeware license, which minimized the risk of losing the right to enforce the copyright in the future. Open source would've been even better, but there are many good reasons why businesses wouldn't want to do that where a product integrates third-party-licensed code (WordPerfect 3.5e for the Mac does, according to its "About" screen) or if the product is still being sold commercially on other platforms. The WordPerfect 3.5e approach won't satisfy open source fundamentalists, but it solves the problem you identify, and it does it with minimal legal risk. Keep it in mind and tell your lawyers or managers about it if you're ever faced with the question of what to do with your company's unsupported commercial software.
(Again, not legal advice, random online ramblings, don't listen to me or anyone else who posts on internet fora.)
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.
If someone mirrors a company's free download page, you can't legally download from the mirror, unless they have redistribution rights, which they don't. A free download from a company means that you are permitted to download from the company, not from anyone else who has a copy, not even a mirror.
Again, probably nobody will arrest you for this, but nobody's likely to arrest you for conventional piracy either.
This is not a mirror. This is apple's actual official download location for this software. Sorry I should've been more clear.
Unfortunately as a result, they're packaged in self mounting Disk Copy images, so you'll need an old mac to unpack them. It's possible someone has developed a tool to extract regular disk images from these files by now.
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.
OK, fair point. Thanks for the suggestion. I've added that at the start, and clarified why Corel got out of Linux, and added a PS about where you can get a good free legal DOS wordprocessor.
The "free edition" was free to download directly from Corel. You can no longer download it from Corel for free, and downloading it from someone else is not permitted by copyright law.
>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.
Other companies distributed the free version, too. It was bundled with at least one print book. It was included with old versions of both SUSE Linux and Mandrake Linux. It was sold, on CD, by various long-gone vendors.
It was available from multiple other sources than Corel, and has been since the early days.
I entirely see where you're coming from, and I've added a paragraph clarifying its status to my blog post. However, given its wide distribution over more than 20 years, which Corel has never seeked to stop, I think it is fair. This is not "abandonware". Corel made this one version free of charge and has never rescinded that.
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).
I noticed Borland/Novell Quattro 6.x (for Win 3.1) is available for download, from before Corel bought the product and rolled it into their Office Suite:
Too old for my purposes, though. I need to convert circa 2002 .qpw files to something modern... And I found I could get there by going older... Using Quattro to save as .wb2, which LibreOffice handles quite nicely. A conversion to XLSX from there mangles things up, but even complex formatting is preserved well saving to ODF/.ods files. LibreOffice 1, Microsoft Office 0.
I see archive.org is hosting the 2000 Linux version:
This is true. There are a lot of "abandonware" versions of all sorts of apps out there. It is almost trivially easy to find a copy of WordPerfect for DOS and install it on DR DOS or PC DOS in a VirtualBox VM, or run it under DOSemu on Linux. I link to instructions on how to do it in that article.
But it's not legal. Abandonware is a nebulous term with no legal meaning.
WordPerfect Corp is gone but the product is alive and well under Corel Corp. This still counts as piracy.
But the MacOS and Linux versions were given away, for free, by WordPerfect Corp and so they are legit.
I have a hazy memory of Corel's distribution coming as a free CD-ROM in a PCI network adapter I bought from CompUSA. Installed it, used it for two weeks, went back to... I think it was Mandrake I was using at the time. Am I going senile?
No, I'm pretty sure I got a copy from a flatmate who bought a USB ethernet adapter and it came with Corel Linux on a CD. This would have been about 2001. Don't think I ever installed it though.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadHave you ever moved your cursor and started typing, only to find out that suddenly you were typing in BOLD? That's due to some bold code left behind from earlier in the edit. In WordPerfect you could press F11 to Reveal all the Codes, delete the bold code, and move on with your day.
Give me a keyboard template and function keys any day over a hodgepodge of nonsensical icons with no obvious organization.
Most people – me included – reckoned that Word 5.1 for the Mac was the last, best version.
If you grab the ShapeShifter VM that I describe and link to in the blog post, and look in the MS Word folder, you may be in for a very pleasant surprise. :-)
In WordPerfect this is activating a TeX mode in addition to your WYSIWYG. You have two buffers, with two coursers, that stay in sync. Maybe the closes analogy is a jupyter notepad for tex? But fast.
I have never seen anything like this, althou LyX offers one mode that is kind of a mix of both of them.
Reveal codes is the ultimate hammer against screwy formatting. No more wondering why your layout went screwy 10 pages away from where you made some minor change to your text, a graphic, or a table. With "reveal codes" available, you can see directly what's going on and fix it right, instead of fumbling about with the formatting tools in Word.
(And no, Markdown isn't, on its own, a replacement for a full-blown word processor, LaTeX, or the like. Many classes of documents just aren't that complicated, though.)
I really wanted to like LaTeX for writing, but I kept having to look up how to use it.
Currently, I use Ulysses for big documents (like multi-chapter stories) as well as for blog posts, since it can publish directly to WordPress, Ghost, Micro.blog, and Medium. It's a little idiosyncratic, and it's for Mac, iOS only.
A very similar app that's for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android is iA Writer. It's also idiosyncratic, but has slightly different pluses and minuses. I used it before Ulysses, though, and might yet go back.
For shorter stuff I tend to write in Drafts, although that's another Mac/iOS thing.
Since I'm obviously a Mac user, I don't know a lot about what's available on Linux other than code editors, which personally I haven't found that I like as much for prose. Definitely a YMMV thing. Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code both have decent Markdown modes and have various extensions to do interesting things, though, like Markdown linting. Emacs and Vim both actually have great Markdown modes, too, but I just don't like either one for prose.
It's a little bloated, but is surprisingly fast - unless you load it down with extensions.
As for whether or not MOM is easier than Markdown for "first draft" writing, though? To pull just a single bit out of a FAQ that I wrote recently, in Markdown I wrote:
From what I see, in MOM, that would become: So when it comes to ease of writing, the thing Markdown was specifically aimed at, I'm gonna say it definitely has the edge. If I was going to typeset a book in Groff, I'd be down for writing a Markdown-to-MOM translator, which seems like it'd probably be pretty easy. But I wouldn't start out drafting in MOM any more than I'd start out drafting in LaTeX. Or HTML.https://box.matto.nl/convert-markdownish-to-pdf-with-groff-m...
In fact, both Google Wave (IIRC, not going to look up the reference right now) and the Medium editor (https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-1...) represent inline formatting as a bucket of non-nested “spans”, because while this still doesn’t yield a unique representation of what you want to call rich text, it gets much easier to pick a canonical representative for each class of equivalent representations that doesn’t get completely upturned by localized editing operations.
Even the text editor example in the GoF book just assigned each character a (shared, CoW) style object... Does anyone actually do it this way?
Emacs does. It has something called "text properties"
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TextProperties#text_property
Colorforth also works this way.
https://colorforth.github.io/parsed.html
The complication arises when you insert text: Users generally prefer to insert a letter between two bold characters and have the word processor "assume" the user meant to type boldface, rather than push a button to put the insert-function into "create bold letters" mode.
In other words (IIRC) reveal codes was made possible largely because the file system representation matched what you saw on screen, so it was easy to keep the visual representation in sync with the file. In Word (certainly now and I think back then as well) it wasn't that way - the file was structured so there was a mis-match between the screen and the file, so keeping the two aspects in sync became more difficult as the in-memory representation was correspondingly structured rather than sequential.
There were law firms that used it well into the late 90s due to the amazing macros they had going. Think of the complicated Excel macros one hears about. Same thing, only with law firms and lawyers.
There are still people who run wordstar (which WP supplanted in the eighties).
I wouldn’t use it now, but is was an amazing product in its day.
(and even if I could multitask, I doubt a 386SX is fast enough to handle an SSL handshake these days)
So, for example, you can try to design the fastest learning protocol for a given set of functionality being acquired by 90% of subjects. It's fairly safe to assume that most college students don't know Word Perfect, so you should be able to get good results doing A/B testing.
You could do experiments like: do people learn Word Perfect faster if they take a 30 minute nap beforehand? Do they learn worse if they do 30 minutes of intense exercise beforehand?
https://archive.org/details/pump_up_the_volume_1990
Also, from an art point of view, I just like the idea of recontextualizing the computer as a device in a psychology experiment. The games you can play with this idea are pretty weird. For example: would you conduct a psychological experiment that attempts to get people better at rationalizing, and risks turning the subjects into monsters capable of rationalizing the decision to perform progressively more grotesque modifications of their body, apparently enhancing their abilities, in the style of Iron Man?
Oh dear. Please don't tell me you're uneducated. I'm so sorry.
Look, I buy weed from the cocaine cartel in [REDACTED]. The local police pay no attention to them, zilch. You know why? Those guys are professionals, and they have nowhere to go. They're stuck. Moreover, it is common knowledge that the CIA controls the drug trade.
These guys are basically baby sitters for drug addicts.
You have nowhere to go. Your nurturing instincts are taking over, and I'm turning this into a historical moment, making this comment the spark that ignites the revolution!
Who makes a bot that goes on message boards and tells people that cocaine cartels have nurturing instincts? Ha!
Is there a hacker news equivalent of the ole shoe on head test? I'm curious if there is someone adding real comments sporadically to throw folks off.
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/).
1 - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLx053rWZxCiYWsBETgdKrQ
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/
I tend to agree with you. WordStar came before WYSIWYG or proportional-font printing, and it never really adapted to those things. By comparison, WordPerfect was a master of getting the absolute best out of any printer you might have -- its printer support was legendarily good.
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
It's a complete DOS spreadsheet in its own right, and a very good one at that. Quattro is the spreadsheet that introduced the feature of highlighting a range, then dragging the corner of the range and the program extrapolates the data and fills in the extra cells -- a very handy function indeed IMHO.
There were a bunch of DOS spreadsheets -- Lotus 1-2-3 was _the_ killer app that led the IBM PC to greatness and created the modern computer industry. VisiCalc for the Apple ][ created spreadsheets and improved the lives of tens of thousands of accountants and executives, but 1-2-3 took that concept and made it far more powerful. The name denotes that it integrates the three key functions of [1] spreadsheeting, [2] generating charts, and [3] building and querying simple databases.
IMHO probably the best value commercial spreadsheet for DOS was Computer Associates' Supercalc 5, which was $49 at the end of its life and a very capable, fully-3D program.
And of course there was Microsoft Multiplan, later combined with Microsoft Chart and wrapped in a GUI to create Microsoft's pioneering first Mac app, called Excel.
But if you knew 1-2-3, then AsEasyAs was a direct copy and the subject of a copy-and-feel lawsuit at the time. It's officially discontinued but as it was shareware it was always free to download and use, and it still is today.
Borland Software Craftsmanship: A New Look at Process, Quality and Productivity [1994] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.12...
Abstract
The Borland Quattro Pro for Windows (QPW) development is one of the most remarkable organizations, processes, and development cultures we have encountered in the AT&T Bell Laboratories Pasteur process research project. The project assimilated requirements, completed design and implementation of 1 million lines of code, and completed testing in 31 months. Coding was done by no more than eight people at a time, which means that individual coding productivity was higher than 1000 lines of code per staff-week. The project capitalized on its small size by centering development activities around daily meetings where architecture, design, and interface issues were socialized. Quality assurance and project management roles were central to the development sociology, in contrast to the developer-centric software production most often observed in our studies of AT&T telecommunications software. Analyses of the development process are ‘‘off the charts’’ relative to most other processes we have studied.
Sadly, I've not yet worked at an org quite this competent, functional, productive. Looking back, it seems this was the high water mark for methodologies, maturity models, software quality assurance, etc.
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 possible for Professional Write?
I have some old files I found when I was going through my floppies, and I can't open them because they're binaries. I did some digging at the time and couldn't find a copy of any kind, let alone a legit one. Any leads would be appreciated.
FileMerlin looks like a good recommendation, but I'm too cheap for that!
I tried following the corporate rabbit trail, from the most generically named "Software Publishing Corporation" to Allegro New Media, then Vizacom, then it either stayed with them or the IP moved to Serif.
You will need DOSBox to install the DOS version.
Running the Windows version is a little bit more complicated. You will need winevdm (windows 3.x emulator)[1]. Download the unstable version, stable is extremely outdated. You can use ImDisk Toolkit[2] to mount the floppies. Unfortunately the installer doesn't seem to work on winevdm, so you will have to manually extract all the .zip files to the same directory and run PWPLUS.EXE from there.
[1] - https://github.com/otya128/winevdm
[2] - https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/
However, back in the days of yore in Jamaica, pretty much every office and law firm that had an IBM-PC had Wordperfect on it.
The secretaries (yes!) back then were goddesses in every key combination, formatting tricks and ways how to print the document exactly how they wanted it.
However, it's not even close to VIM for casual text editing.
Please, let it stay in the past where it belongs.
Last stable release of VIM was 18 months ago.
I'm not sure you're on the right side of the "let it stay in the past" argument.
I really doubt that. For example, the vim website lists the latest stable Windows build as v8.2.2824, released on 2 May, which is about 40 days old.
Not that this is relevant to parent's point.
Well, yes, this is somewhat true. I went through the pain of that learning curve in about 1989.
But WordPerfect got a lot better after v5 when they introduced CUA-style drop-down menus. After that you could explore and slowly learn the program and just use the F-key combinations you most needed as accelerators.
The Linux, Mac and Windows versions are perfectly standard GUI apps and are no harder to learn or use than any other GUI apps. They're also very fast on modern kit.
I remember getting older and my mom being annoyed that Wordperfect seemed to be on it's way out and how much more awful Word was
I supported WordPerfect for various law practices in the courts around Chancery Lane in London well into the MS Office era.
The main reason was not templates; it was the word-count function.
MS Word has a very odd implementation of features like headers and footers, footnotes, tables of contents etc. It considers them separate areas of the document, and so when you do a word count, they are not included.
For authors who are paid by the book, this isn't very important. For journalists, who aren't paid for headers and footers, only raw ASCII text excluding such things, it's almost good.
But for lawyers, who are paid a lot of money -- far more than journos or authors -- for every single word, it matters a lot. WordPerfect counts every damned word, wherever it is, whatever region of the document it's in -- so they get paid for all the words the client received.
This could well be a difference of thousands of pounds/dollars/euros/whatever.
For that, a single copy of WordPerfect at £150-£250 could well pay for itself by the first document you sent out.
I used to have an academic version of Word Perfect 5.1 that worked like the commercial version only in printing out it would print asterisks on the printout. It was free and good for editing.
I had a boss back in early 00's that insisted on WordPerfect (even though it was already dying). So I learned it and never learned Word quite as well. (Mostly because I never took another job that required knowing an office suite well).
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.
Workers' pay rates have barely risen over the last 40 years, while the C-suite have risen by hundreds of percentage points.
Remember, minimal wage = minimal effort.
It is different situation if you are working a summer job and going to Harvard or Stanford or any university, and work real hard in minimum wage job, because when you graduate, you will be earning hundreds of thousands of dollars. But for people who are stuck at the $7.25 federal minimum wage to $10 or $12 for life because they have a high school education and that's all they have going for them, don't expect them to think about it the same way that you think about it.
Any citation?
In the past 10 years bottom 50% wealth rose by more than 10 times and median household income increased by 40%.
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107 [2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
Except $22,415.00 in 1984 is worth $55,154.49 in 2019. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
So the actual increase was 24.6% over 35 years assuming 2019 wasn’t some outlying peak and 1984 wasn’t an unusually bad year. We can check 1984 by going another 20 years to 1964 and the median household income was 6,600 which is $54,430.20 in 2019 or an increase of 26.2% in 55 years. Can’t prove 2019 is also an outlier, but that “40%” increase in 10 years suggests it likely is.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1965/demo/p60-04...
PS: And yes end years matter. Inflation adjusted median household income increased form 1964 to 2009 by 6.6% in 45 years. Perhaps things have fundamentally changed in the last 10 years, but it’s not likely.
There are people that simply are not capable. Not because of desire or attitude, but because of IQ, resources, connections, training, etc.
And, there's only 1000 CEO's at the Fortune 1000. There are 330 million Americans, not all of them can be CEO of a Fortune 1000. If you do the math, 1000 / 330000000 = 0.000003 of US citizens will become CEO of a Fortune 1000 company. This is a metaphor, by the way. What I am saying is that it is a zero sum game and there are only so many high paying wages to go around.
For example, Walmart has 2.3 million workers. How would they all make $120,000 per year, if they all, as you say, have total interest in creating value? Never. It will never happen. What would you say if you were the store manager, or district manager, or regional manager of Walmart and every single employee came up to YOU and said, "Hey, I want to create value at Walmart, and want to earn $120,000 per year. What do we all need to do?" And nobody wants to be the door greeter, nobody wants to be the cashier, but every single one wants to be the store manager? And you cannot find one single person that wants to be cashier, they all want to be store manager? Walmart would all of a sudden have 0 employees, and then 0 customers because they would be out of business.
You see, you and most people reading these remarks are in rarified company. Smart. Talented. Capable. Someone who graduates from Harvard or Standford or MIT literally has the world at their feet and can literally almost do anything they set their mind to. Because they have the actual IQ and resources, and connections to do so. But there's only so many spots open every year at elite schools, and 99.99999999% of the USA or world will never, ever get a whiff of those schools. But not everyone is that way. You'll never get someone who has Down's Syndrome to run a Fortune 1000 company, and I'm not being down on those with Downs. It's just reality.
Another example: If you are raised on the south side of Chicago, in the baddest part of town, and if you're raised down there, you better just beware, that you'll run into Leroy Brown and he will put you and your peers to work selling crack cocaine and you will never, never, never get into Harvard, except for some very rare outlier. And you will think it is normal because you didn't grow up white in Los Altos Hills or Atherton, CA where you learned completely different things growing up. I'm sure that NOBODY reading this would want to change places with a black boy or girl growing up in south Chicago.
That way that company across the ocean that manages to get these productivity enhancers in, can eat the lazy bums' lunch.
Compare https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
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.
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...
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.
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.
In fact they were working on a new chipset when Commodore went bankrupt. Had they started earlier on it, it might have saved the company, that and the Commodore 65.
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.
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.)
Meanwhile I have some mid-90s Win32 apps that still work fine on Windows 10, and a bunch of miscellaneous DOS utilities from the 80s that are just as functional. Of course, the same applies to those versions of WordPerfect. As much as people like to talk about "DLL hell" on Windows, the dependency problem seems far worse on Linux. I know of some very expensive software (IC design/EDA) that's very difficult to get running on anything but a specific minor version of a specific distro.
Mostly fixed by containers, which the solution proposed here, and other new technologies like flatpaks, snaps and appimages. It is sad we have no unique ultimate solution for the problem, but yes it is mostly solved nowadays.
What does this say about trying to run a 25 year old office suite? Have you tried running word 4.0 on windows 10 lately? Will it print?
Me, personally, I run IBM PC DOS 7.1 (also a free download from IBM) under VirtualBox, and I run my handful of DOS apps in that.
Linux never cared that much. If you're living in an open source world, binary compatibility isn't seen as important. At least that was my impression in the early days, but even now the corporations don't seem to care as much because desktop applications and other binary blobs don't target Linux as much. And for the server-side stuff, you've got containers or VMs.
I would bet that some gamers would cry out if a future revision would derive them of their Steam bloabs.
On the technical side, I do wonder how Windows pulls it all of. Sure, there's more API stability and often fewer external libraries, but there are also the compatibility modes you can set and probably some hidden stuff that you don't have to switch on manually. Wouldn't even be surprised if Windows itself would do a similar thing like GPU drivers and fix some compatibility problems for well-known applications ("I see this is Winword 2.0, so let's work around an allocator bug").
Raymond Chen (Microsoft) wrote a book about it all, and runs a blog which mentions instances too - sorry, I don't have the links to hand, but he is easily found.
For important stuff like SimCity and Doom for example the Windows developers tested those apps to find any issues, debugged them, and actually made Windows change its behaviour depending upon the app that was running.
It didn't even matter that a bug was down to a game using undocumented features as the team knew Windows would still get the blame from the public/press for it not running, so it became necessary to make sure they worked even if Windows itself had to have per-program hacks added.
Valve seems to be betting on it, as Steam on Linux seems to use runtimes that are very similar to flatpaks.
No, not really.
I am a Linux and Mac user. I don't run or use Windows unless I really need it – for instance for reflashing firmware.
The modern version of WordPerfect is a perfectly good app, but it's a perfectly good Windows app, and I work on Linux.
This is a native Linux app and for that reason it is preferable.
Oh yes indeed. MS forced them to change course. I should add a paragraph about that.
It's quite sad. WordPerfect was a product I used a lot in the 1990s. LibreOffice and Word drives me nuts these days as so many things with the document model just don't make sense, whereas WordPerfect 5.1 and reveal codes made it easy to delete stray formatting codes to get the desired results.
WordPerfect Corp screwed up twice over, and it's a minor miracle any of it survived.
First, it bought into the hype and spent a lot of effort porting WP to OS/2 -- then OS/2 bombed, of course.
It subsequently did a Windows version, but the first version was not a very good Windows app. The company spent a huge amount of effort on bringing across its own industry-best printer-driver system... but Windows already provided that, so it was largely a wasted effort.
(WP had fantastic printer support and could really get the absolute best out of any printer's capabilities. Windows just ignored all that, and dumped a bitmap of the page to the printer in graphics mode. Terrible on a dot-matrix or early inkjet, but it did get you all the fancy fonts and so on. But when Windows 3.1 included its own TrueType font rendering system, and as the market moved to hires bubblejets and lasers, it was the way to go.)
WordPerfect for Windows did evolve into a very good app, in time. I wish I'd bought a legit version when it was part of the Remote Worker's Humble Bundle last year. :-(
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.
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.)
(I'm not from US, and I only have a very vague idea about how the US legal system works)
Buy it second hand on eBay or craigslist or whatever, I guess. Or reimplement it.
Of course neither of these are good options, just the "technically legal" way.
But that's not really related to US legal system or 'western countries', the core principles of copyright are the same almost universally across the globe - here's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention#/media/File:B... a map of Berne convention signatories, there are just a few countries where that doesn't apply. The strictness and likelihood of enforcement of those laws varies a lot, though.
Note that under the law of some countries the right not to distribute a copyrighted work is viewed as a sort of natural or "moral" right to control one's creation. The US doesn't generally take that view; we think of copyright and copyright damages mostly in economic terms. Thus, if your "pirating" isn't actually doing economic harm to the rightsholder, you're somewhat unlikely to owe massive damages. Countries with more moralistic copyright regimes may have stiffer penalties in your scenario.
You might have some pity for Apple in your scenario (I do) because the law strongly encourages rights holders to bring a lawsuit in order to protect their rights. It's a use-it-or-you-might-lose-it-to-some-unknown-extent scenario, and lawyers and companies hate uncertainty. This can lead companies sue for copyright violations even when they don't really care. For example, a book's and publishing house probably don't care about a fanfiction blog. They may even like fanfiction because it's grassroots promotion of their product. But they may still feel forced to sue to stop fanfiction so that their rights aren't questioned the next time they need to sue, e.g., a bootlegger that's passing off unlicensed copies of their product as the real thing on Amazon.
On a more positive note, I like TFA because it highlights a company that did The Right Thing. WordPerfect made its Mac product (WordPerfect 3.5e) freely available when it stopped selling Mac software. WordPerfect 3.5e was released in a responsible way too (IIRC) by creating a special freeware license, which minimized the risk of losing the right to enforce the copyright in the future. Open source would've been even better, but there are many good reasons why businesses wouldn't want to do that where a product integrates third-party-licensed code (WordPerfect 3.5e for the Mac does, according to its "About" screen) or if the product is still being sold commercially on other platforms. The WordPerfect 3.5e approach won't satisfy open source fundamentalists, but it solves the problem you identify, and it does it with minimal legal risk. Keep it in mind and tell your lawyers or managers about it if you're ever faced with the question of what to do with your company's unsupported commercial software.
(Again, not legal advice, random online ramblings, don't listen to me or anyone else who posts on internet fora.)
[0] https://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Sof...
Again, probably nobody will arrest you for this, but nobody's likely to arrest you for conventional piracy either.
Unfortunately as a result, they're packaged in self mounting Disk Copy images, so you'll need an old mac to unpack them. It's possible someone has developed a tool to extract regular disk images from these files by now.
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.
" 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"
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.
Other companies distributed the free version, too. It was bundled with at least one print book. It was included with old versions of both SUSE Linux and Mandrake Linux. It was sold, on CD, by various long-gone vendors.
It was available from multiple other sources than Corel, and has been since the early days.
I entirely see where you're coming from, and I've added a paragraph clarifying its status to my blog post. However, given its wide distribution over more than 20 years, which Corel has never seeked to stop, I think it is fair. This is not "abandonware". Corel made this one version free of charge and has never rescinded that.
[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!
https://winworldpc.com/product/quattro-pro/6x
Too old for my purposes, though. I need to convert circa 2002 .qpw files to something modern... And I found I could get there by going older... Using Quattro to save as .wb2, which LibreOffice handles quite nicely. A conversion to XLSX from there mangles things up, but even complex formatting is preserved well saving to ODF/.ods files. LibreOffice 1, Microsoft Office 0.
I see archive.org is hosting the 2000 Linux version:
https://archive.org/details/CorelForLinux
This is true. There are a lot of "abandonware" versions of all sorts of apps out there. It is almost trivially easy to find a copy of WordPerfect for DOS and install it on DR DOS or PC DOS in a VirtualBox VM, or run it under DOSemu on Linux. I link to instructions on how to do it in that article.
But it's not legal. Abandonware is a nebulous term with no legal meaning.
WordPerfect Corp is gone but the product is alive and well under Corel Corp. This still counts as piracy.
But the MacOS and Linux versions were given away, for free, by WordPerfect Corp and so they are legit.
That's why I wrote the blog post. :-)
It had IMHO the best version of KDE 2 I ever used.
Corel sold it off and it became Xandros, which was also a good distro and had a freeware version -- but both are long obsolete now.
https://boxofcables.dev/corel-linux-1-2/