[HN Gopher] WordPerfect for UNIX (1992)
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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.
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