[HN Gopher] WordPerfect for UNIX (1992) ___________________________________________________________________ WordPerfect for UNIX (1992) Author : taviso Score : 163 points Date : 2022-07-18 16:26 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (lock.cmpxchg8b.com) (TXT) w3m dump (lock.cmpxchg8b.com) | laurensr wrote: | As a kid I used to have, what I thought, was WordPerfect 6 on MS- | DOS 6.22 It did not have a blue background, but looked graphical | like MS Word today. It even had some clipart such as an alpinist. | | Does anyone recognize the software I'm describing? I've been | searching for this out of nostalgia. | AlanYx wrote: | WordPerfect 6 did have a graphical mode with a white background | that looked a lot like MS Word, even when running on DOS. I | can't remember, but it might even have been the default if you | had a VGA card. CTRL-F3 would flip you back to the old blue | background character mode interface. | taviso wrote: | WordPerfect 6 did have an optional graphical mode that wrote | directly to the framebuffer, I've never used it though! | | Is it possible you're thinking of that? | | There is a screenshot of it on this page: | https://thewanderingnerd.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/corel-word... | watersb wrote: | "Hit F10 to Save Changes" | | I worked in an office at the advent of the Windows era, in those | last years of DOS WP 5.1 dominance. Friends of mine were making | steady money, writing printer drivers for the crazy range of | laser printers coming to market. | | I was the Macintosh Guy, and never developed a muscle memory for | the WordPerfect key bindings. | | Thank you, WordPerfect, for giving me bizarre keyboard commands | for my BIOS settings. | WillAdams wrote: | The NeXTstep version was quite nice, especially for having been | ported in some six weeks, or so the story goes. | frognumber wrote: | WordPerfect for Linux, from SDCorp, was the best word processor I | ever used. Future versions were a lot worse; they re-ported it | with some Windows compatibility layer. | | Any clue where I might find a copy? | haunter wrote: | Corel Linux 1.2 which had WP 8.1 included | https://archive.org/details/corel_linux_1.2 | | Then you can install it easily on modern distros either by | script or manually | | http://www.xwp8users.com/wp81script.htm | | http://www.xwp8users.com/wp81else.htm | snapetom wrote: | I worked in law offices and data entry in the early 90's through | high school, and some college. When HTML came along, it was | pretty much the same style of syntaxing as WP, so it was | extremely easy to pick up. I was one of the early HTMLers, | helping my school departments. This led me down the road to | software engineering. | | There are several fortuitous milestones in my career. Working | with WP was probably the first major one. | lizknope wrote: | I was in college from 1993-97 and ran Linux on my PC. I started | to learn LaTeX but I realized that it was easier to just write | reports in text and do a tiny amount of formatting in HTML. I | could use img src to include a few diagrams and then print it | out in the computer lab. | eterps wrote: | Reveal codes [1] was such a useful feature, I really miss it in | 'modern' word processing apps. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes | bombcar wrote: | Word has "show formatting" which .... is a very poor | substitute but can sometimes help. | | I find Word becomes much more manageable if you religiously | use styles instead of ad-hoc formatting. | snapetom wrote: | Even WP didn't really get Reveal Codes on their own program | right when they went to Windows. That tool is just way more | appropriate for monospaced terminals instead of WYSIWYG. | pimlottc wrote: | > I find Word becomes much more manageable if you | religiously use styles instead of ad-hoc formatting. | | I agree with this tip but it requires very rigorous | discipline and is basically impossible to maintain if | you're working with any collaborators. | themadturk wrote: | I worked for law firm in the mid-90s who developed a | robust set of Word styles that were pretty much required | internally and made for nice, consistent documents (and | could even be applied pretty well to documents from the | outside). Now I work for people who work heavily with | Word and wouldn't know a style if it bit them in the ass. | actually_a_dog wrote: | Agreed. At that point, LaTeX not only all but _requires_ | you to use styles, .tex files are text-based for easy | version control. | | I wouldn't necessarily say I'd endorse LaTeX for | collaboration _per se_ among people who don 't normally | use it, but I think it points the way toward what a good | collaborative writing tool would look like. | bombcar wrote: | For all of its faults "GitHub markdown" works decently | well for collaborative writing; the number of people who | are willing to learn LaTeX just to work on a document is | way too small compared to the number who would greatly | have their life made easier by doing so. | amelius wrote: | It's basically the browser's developer's DOM view before it | existed. | chasil wrote: | Just in case anybody forgot, there is a free version of | Wordperfect for Linux (non-commercial use only). | | https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/80768.html | indigodaddy wrote: | I'm guessing WP8 isn't going to be able to open modernish doc | files and certainly not docx? Or might it? | bluedino wrote: | One of my first jobs was for a local MSP who had a lot of law | offices as clients. Beyond the massive CD towers that contained | Lexis Nexis and other legal libraries, everyone used | WordPerfect. For DOS. | | Why would you do this, when Windows and Office 97 existed? | | You could view open documents and scroll through them with the | keyboard. | | Click, click, click, click - "That's the one I need!", a lawyer | would bark out. It took far too much time to use the mouse and | open documents one-by-one. Even if you hit Alt, F, O, you still | had to scroll through hundreds or thousands of files, try to | remember where you were...back then you had friendly filenames | like DM928032.WDP | meebee wrote: | Anyone ever see WP source code, or maybe an open source clone | project? Many aspects of WP (mostly the reveal codes) is still | useful (much like markdown), that I'm surprised that an up to | date open source app isn't available. | ballenf wrote: | I know a lots been said about WP's "reveal codes", but I just | realized it was the last time using a word processor where I felt | like I was actually in charge and not just cajoling the thing to | make things look how I wanted. | | I've gotten very proficient with Word over the years, but there | are still times where GUI reveals itself to be a leaky | abstraction. Things where table formatting can vary wildly | depending on seemingly inconsequential change in the order of | making changes. | | What makes it worse is that there's always some hidden setting or | configuration somewhere to blame, so you never really can blame | Word. | petilon wrote: | > _so you never really can blame Word_ | | Absolutely, you can. Microsoft has long stopped improving the | basic word processing features. When there is no competition | Microsoft stops improving their products. | reaperducer wrote: | _When there is no competition Microsoft stops improving their | products._ | | Coincidentally, at this very moment I am re-creating an old | paper form for another department in the company. They need | it as a PDF. | | The people from the department sent me their best effort as a | Word document. It's a disaster of mismatched styles, | misaligned boxes, things that get cut off for no discernible | reason, and stuff that won't print right because it's past | Word's margins. | | I'm almost done re-creating it in Pages, from which I'll | output a PDF. It's gone swimmingly. | | Pages isn't yet a replacement for every single little thing | that Word does, but for the things it does do, it works well, | quickly, predictably, and fast. But that may be Word's | downfall: It took the kitchen sink route and became a mess. | | Pages is a good basic word processor for those who are | interested in processing words. It's less "powerful" at doing | all the thousand other things that people use Word for that | they should probably do in Acrobat. | EEMac wrote: | > What makes it worse is that there's always some hidden | setting or configuration somewhere to blame, so you never | really can blame Word. | | Yes you can. | retrocryptid wrote: | Sixels are effing awesome. A friend built some tools for us to do | basic graphics for environments we're already ssh'ing into. So we | can get basic graphs from the command line without having to move | over to the browser and click around to log in and figure out | which dashboard to look at. https://youtu.be/0LTfGgqboE8 | bluedino wrote: | If you're up for a read about how WordPerfect got started and | rose to fame, _Almost Perfect_ isn 't a bad read. They battle | Microsoft, OS/2 is mentioned a lot, lots of fun stuff. | | http://www.wordplace.com/ap/ | russellbeattie wrote: | I actually thought it was a great read and, in my opinion, | shows exactly why non-technologists should _never_ be in charge | of tech companies or products. Peterson was technically inept - | by his own admission - and in the long run, this is what killed | WP. Releasing a flagship DOS product in 1993?? It was mind | boggling even back then when I first entered the tech industry. | bolangi wrote: | I still have a reference manual for XyWrite on my shelf. Cool | people used XyWrite. WP won. | ExtremisAndy wrote: | Second this recommendation. Fun read! I know a lot of HN folks | won't be as impressed as I was, but I had no idea they wrote | the first several versions of WordPerfect for DOS in assembly. | To me, at least, THAT is impressive. I wouldn't even know where | to begin to start a project like that in assembly. | bombcar wrote: | You start with a macro assembler - MASM being an example - | which lets you handle many things in a surprisingly high- | level manner. | linguae wrote: | There was a Macintosh word processor named WriteNow that was | a major competitor to MacWrite back in the 1980s and was also | written in assembly: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow | smm11 wrote: | And now "View Source" is like staring at the night sky trying to | see what the fancy satellites do. | shrubble wrote: | The notcurses project, notcurses.com has some pretty wild demos | of what can be done with sixel etc. | h2odragon wrote: | Never played with WP Unix that much, but the notion that their | printer driver system could be adapted to terminal output doesn't | seem surprising: it could print that image on dot matrix printers | speaking several different "printer control language" variants, | some of which required some ingenious hacks. Terminal graphics | fit quite well within that family. | | WP also had pretty good support for the early laser printers, | which had a _wide_ range of ways to tell them to do stuff. Some | wanted bitmaps, some built their own and you had to sent them | fonts; etc. It was UGLY. | | IIRC they even had some drivers for optical type setter things, | the old stuff that used thermal paper. Not sure of those made it | to version 5 era. | taviso wrote: | It's not surprising that it's possible, sixels are basically | just a canvas. It's that they've always been a novelty, very | rarely used or supported. Yet somehow they made it into a | commercial product in 1992 -- that's surprising! | | I think sixels are seeing some resurgence today, terminals are | fast enough now to use it to render video. I wonder if GNU ls | will add ls --thumbnails :) | acomjean wrote: | Oh yeah, because it was a MSDOS (or unix) program, it had a lot | of printer drivers built it, the OS not providing those. | | I remember working for the Government and having to use carbon | paper in the 1990s, which meant using the "daisy wheel" | printer[1]. Somehow I selected the wrong printer, and every | line printed backwards. Strange times. I don't think this sixel | graphics would have printed.. | | [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing | therealcamino wrote: | If you read the sixel Wikipedia page, it sounds like sixel | actually originated as a format to drive DEC's dot matrix | printers. So if WP had an LA210 driver, maybe they were most of | the way there already. | rubinlinux wrote: | Novell purchased WordPerfect in 1994, and then sold it to Corel | in 1996. So congratulations goes to Wordperfect Corporation | itself, since this was 1992. | abotsis wrote: | I'll be damned - printing to postscript even works! | ilaksh wrote: | Its really fascinating to me to imagine what computing would be | like if we used different types of protocols. | | xterm also supports vector graphics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010#Graphics_protoc... | | I wonder if there could be some kind of revival of some of this | stuff if we saw more support in modern tools. | | Is there something like xterm for linux that is more up-to-date | but includes Tektronix and sixel? | | I think it could be really useful to have a new interactive | streaming protocol focused on being lightweight and fast loading | with high compression, but for VR devices and 3d interfaces. | | It could also be streaming in data from multiple peers, content- | oriented. Focus on efficient, small modules describing scenes and | programs. | | But the biggest concept is that we aren't waiting for millions or | billions of bytes to load. | jrm4 wrote: | Absolutely, especially if you watch (and lament) the absolute | mess that is GUI programming in Linux. I feel like something | like https://github.com/BashGui/easybashgui (in terms of | user/creator experience) shouldn't be that hard. | ok123456 wrote: | Back in high school in the late 90s, I bought a pallet of | Tektronix 4211 terminals [1] for about $40 from a local place | that resold old computer junk. All in total there were about 10 | of the terminal base units and three, for the time, extremely | large 21" monitors. I figured this came from an engineering | firm, since these terminals also came with some digitizer pads. | | I thought they were X-Terminals and was very disappointed that | I couldn't get them do anything beyond being text terminals. It | was only recently that I discovered that they were actually | intended to be used with this proprietary graphics protocol. | | [1] Exactly like this: | https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/1994._Sh... | ilaksh wrote: | Do you still have them? | ok123456 wrote: | I gave a couple to friends. (I think one of them ended up | becoming target practice.) | | The rest got thrown out after I moved out. | georgia_peach wrote: | The achilles heel of these old inline display protocols is that | there's little to no reporting from the client side as to | dimension/resolution/resize/interaction... And to fix this in a | performant way, it would need the ability to handle as many of | those events as possible on the client side, hence some kind of | VM & endless mitigations for it--chrome all over again. | | > _something like xterm for linux that is more up-to-date_ | | Dickey put _a lot_ of effort into xterm--especially on the | correct emulation of old protocols like tektronics. The GPU- | accelerateds may be the new hotness, but I don 't think many of | those devs are interested in software archaeology like | tektronics & sixel. | jhallenworld wrote: | Sixel should be more universal: in particular I'm wishing that | PuTTY and especially TeraTERM on Windows supported it. It would | allow non-sw engineers (hence Windows) to see graphics from | embedded systems that use serial ports. | georgia_peach wrote: | mintty (cygwin) supports sixel & iTerm2 format inline | png/gif/jpg | | https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html | jhallenworld wrote: | Yeah, mintty is too difficult (the user would need to use | picocom or something to connect to the serial port). iTerm2 | is MAC only... | georgia_peach wrote: | RLogin also supports sixel & iTerm2 formats, and has built- | in serial support. The default is in Japanese, but they | have language packs. | | https://kmiya-culti.github.io/RLogin/ | jhallenworld wrote: | Rlogin looks promising. One other requirement I forgot is | that it needs to support x/y/z-modem, and Rlogin does. | csdvrx wrote: | > Sixel should be more universal | | Agreed! | | So try sixel-tmux: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux | | > It would allow non-sw engineers (hence Windows) | | I run Windows 11 as my main OS. sixel-tmux was written to help | the users of non-sixel-aware terminals: every time a sixel | sequence is intercepted, it's either: | | - rewritten to ASCII art through derasterize if your terminal | doesn't support sixels | | - passed as-is if your terminal supports sixels | | > to see graphics from embedded systems that use serial ports | | If you use a serial port software such as minicom inside a | terminal running sixel-tmux (ex: Windows terminal) it should | work | k4r1 wrote: | You should try some modern terminals fx.: | | - Contour https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour | | - Wezterm https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/ | | Both fast terminals with modern features and cross platform. | Also checkout Notcurses: | | https://notcurses.com/ | | Here is a video of the Notcurses demo running in a terminal: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY | retrocryptid wrote: | There's been talk about adding sixel support to windows term | for a couple years. I went back to BSD as a daily driver as | work on this issue started picking up, but it looks like | progress is being made: | | https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/448 | junon wrote: | There have been pushes for sixel for ages. I just don't think | it's going to happen. | georgia_peach wrote: | It's okay for low-color/solid-run images, terrible for | everything else. Nachman's image mime blobs (iTerm2 style) is | the superior approach. mintty/mlterm/rlogin/wezterm already | support it. Kitty has an (incompatible) variant--same idea, | but delivered in chunks. | jhallenworld wrote: | Thanks, will try this. Wish xterm was on the list, but | mlterm is OK. | retrocryptid wrote: | Sixels are compatible with cursor positioning escape | sequences, so I can position the image on the screen. I | wasn't able to do this with term2. Very possible I just | didn't see how to do it though. If you have a pointer to | docs for making that work, I'd love to play around with it. | csdvrx wrote: | > terrible for everything else | | Define terrible. Wasteful, yes. But when we run chat | programs inside electron apps, does it really matters? | | > is the superior approach | | My idea of superiority is linked to availability and | support. Multiple competing formats are often a problem | | > Kitty has an (incompatible) variant | | Indeed, the multiple competing formats might each have some | specific technical advantages, but networks effect makes | your life harder. | georgia_peach wrote: | > _when when run chat programs inside electron apps, does | it really matters?_ | | From a dev perspective, it's a lot easier to base64 an | image you already have, with a base64 that's already in | your stdlibs, than to scour github for a passable sixel | library to pre-rasterize that jpeg & reformat it as | sixel. I say this as someone who's written a sixel | conversion library. | | > _competing formats_ | | It's not a very old format, yet already supported on 4-5 | terminals last I checked. | retrocryptid wrote: | Or you could just use the libsixel package. Downloading | libraries isn't unknown to developers (thinking about | `apt-get install libncurses5-dev libsixel-dev` or the | like.) Or sysadmins: `apt-get install libncurses5` or | `apt-get install libsixel`. | mongol wrote: | > Indeed, the multiple competing formats might each have | some specific technical advantages, but networks effect | makes your life harder. | | Any hope for standardization? | pcwalton wrote: | Yeah, I don't see the point in trying to resurrect a dead | standard that isn't very efficient or widely supported. | Backwards compatibility is important, but sixels aren't even | that well supported nowadays+, so there's not much to be | compatible _with_. Better to just push for new de facto | standards for images in the terminal; trying to resurrect | sixels is an exercise in retrocomputing. | | + xterm and iTerm2 are the only widely-used terminal | emulators nowadays that support sixels. Few Linux users use | plain old xterm nowadays due to lack of desktop integration, | and iTerm2 is not the OS default terminal (and it supports a | better image format anyway). Also note that no popular | Windows terminal emulators (conhost.exe, conemu, Microsoft | Terminal) support sixels at all. | retrocryptid wrote: | The idea here is you can get graphics via a ssh connection. | You don't need to setup a web interface to collect and | process metrics. | | It's useful cause you don't have to take your fingers off | the keyboard to get graphical information. | | And yeah. I would be just as happy to use NAPLPS, but Sixel | support is what we have. | jph00 wrote: | sixel works fine, and is better supported than a "new de | facto standard" the doesn't even exist yet. It's not at all | true that no popular windows s/w supports it - | mintty/wsltty supports it just fine and is widely used. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-18 23:00 UTC)