[HN Gopher] Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
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Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
Author : razin
Score : 150 points
Date : 2024-07-02 17:11 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.heraldextra.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.heraldextra.com)
| tgma wrote:
| The WordPerfect story as told by an early executive, Pete
| Peterson:
|
| http://www.wordplace.com/ap/almostperfect.pdf
| songeater wrote:
| This one and Sid Meier's "Memoir!" are two of my favourite
| software dev stories. Both are quick easy reads / and from the
| same era... code-nostalgia and hard- business mixed together.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| "The Autodesk File Bits of History, Words of Experience":
|
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/
| teddyh wrote:
| The Network Revolution - confessions of a computer
| scientist (1982)
| <https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC>
| Scoundreller wrote:
| The things that were possible in 1980, when you could work
| mornings in a grocery store making FOUR dollars an hour,
| covering your house payment (with a large garden!) because your
| drapery business is failing.
| Phiwise_ wrote:
| Partially because where WP set up shop, the Utah Valley in
| the 1980s, was mostly still a rural county with a barely-
| semi-urban exclave at the middle. Living in the center of
| Provo let you pretend to be surrounded by actual development
| while you worked or got your Psych degree, but WordPerfect
| was building itself on top of apple orchards and alfalfa
| fields once they went a few miles outside in any direction.
| The land was much, much cheaper, and the old steelworkers'
| not-even-ramblers much smaller, than even the neighboring
| Salt Lake Valley a few tens of miles to the north, which by
| now had a mostly-developed mix despite being more than a
| little larger, let alone any of the actually urban metro
| areas high tech businesses usually tend to spring up in.
|
| Nowadays, though, the place is pretty much built out, and the
| land prices have spiked accordingly since most of the nearby
| areas are BLM land. Don't expect a next WordPerfect any time
| soon.
| kcplate wrote:
| I was around back in the mid '80s and don't recall my $4/hour
| PT job being able to be stretched that far. Especially when
| mortgage rates in the early '80s were bouncing around 10-12%.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| vi/vim users everywhere gonna love this one:
|
| _" He also eliminated the different typing modes which plagued
| the early word processors. With other products, if you were
| typing new text at the end of a document, you had to be in a
| Create mode. If you typed in the middle, you had to be in an
| Edit mode. In an Edit mode, your typing would erase existing
| text, so to insert text, you had to change to an Insert mode.
| Alan allowed the user to type anywhere in the document without
| a mode change"_
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I use neovim, but I actually really _prefer_ the Wordstar-
| like editing model (same /similar to Word Perfect's?).
|
| You'd think that would push me towards emacs, but I just get
| the sense that neovim has a more active community.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Emacs is probably more active than ever.
|
| But it's a whole thing. Ends up being a whole all-
| encompassing world view. It's my preferred editor, and I
| love and have memorized the default key bindings and window
| management years ago... but I also ... have a love hate
| thing with it. Something always needs tweaking and it takes
| so long to start.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| If it worked at s-expression level rather than character
| level, it would make total sense! Editing and inserting are
| different phases.
|
| And of course it's trendy writers' advice today to do not mix
| writing with editing. Create vs. Edit mode embodied that
| before it was popular.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| This was a great story, I really enjoyed reading about it.
| elzbardico wrote:
| I knew an old guy who worked at Wordperfect, he absolutely
| hated Pete Peterson with passion. From what he told me, Pete
| would be exactly the kind of guy that would insist on an Return
| to Office police just because if you are not suffering, you're
| not giving us back all we pay you.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Bastian
|
| Related (from Wikipedia references):
|
| https://www.deseret.com/utah/2024/06/17/word-perfect-co-foun...
|
| https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/bruce-bastian-co-fo...
|
| https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-mou...
| canucker2016 wrote:
| The legacy.com link lists cause of death as pulmonary fibrosis.
|
| https://www.legacy.com/news/celebrity-deaths/bruce-bastian-1...
| dang wrote:
| I changed the url from https://www.wsj.com/tech/bruce-bastian-
| wordperfect-lgbtq-act... because that one doesn't appear to have
| any paywall workaround.
|
| It does appear to be a better article though, so if someone finds
| a link that people can actually read, we can swap it back.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Here is a free link https://www.wsj.com/tech/bruce-bastian-
| wordperfect-lgbtq-act..., although I'm not sure how many clicks
| it will support, but here it is anyway.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Black Bar?
|
| (Emailed as well.)
| ssl-3 wrote:
| So long, and thanks for _Reveal Codes_.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| ALT F3, my dear incredibly powerful friend. There wasn't a jam
| you couldn't get out of once the magic codes behind the curtain
| were revealed.
| kstrauser wrote:
| For those who weren't there at the time:
|
| Imagine that all web editors emitted a proprietary document
| format that wasn't documented anywhere except in the editor
| that wrote a file and the viewer that interpreted it. You lived
| with this because that's just the way it was done. It was
| common to get a web page into such a state that 2/3 of the page
| was red, one column was RTL for some reason, and everything was
| in italics except for the 1 word you wanted to be that way.
|
| You were used to this. It wasn't great, but that's life.
|
| And then someone released a web editor with a "reveal HTML"
| setting that suddenly showed you that `<font color="red">` tag
| that messed everything up and allowed you to delete it.
|
| That's what _Reveal Codes_ did for us. It was a revelation.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Yep. It's just like a right-click "View Page Source" function
| in a browser, except: A person can use it to perform
| modifications.
|
| Everything in WordPerfect was just markup, and it was
| _editable_ markup at that.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| The "Reveal Codes" is a good idea. WYSIWYG without Reveal Codes
| is no good.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| The goto office package during MSDOS time period - First WordStar
| then Multimate and then WordPerfect.
|
| Famous for supporting every printer manufactured on planet Earth
| - 3 disks of printer drivers.
|
| Afaik it was written in assembler hence the tough time when they
| needed to move to more modern OS/2 with Presentation Manager and
| then later Windows 3.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| You could download zillions more from their BBS, especially
| when new printers came out. That list was seemingly endless.
|
| Also, when they supported video cards for print preview,
| similarly they had extensive support.
| criddell wrote:
| WordPerfect is still being sold. Lawyers used to love it, but I
| think they've mostly moved on to Word now. So who's still buying
| new licenses for WP in 2024?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Some authors still used it too
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _I still use WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24413394
| jccalhoun wrote:
| They haven't released a new version since 2021 so I am guessing
| hardly anyone is still buying WordPerfect. I'm guessing that
| like Winzip (which they also own) it is just going on fumes now
| while the company that owns it is focusing on other products.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| F10, F7
| hbarka wrote:
| Brings back so many memories. WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Novell,
| and Wang Computers. So long, Mr Bastian, and thank you
| banish-m4 wrote:
| And Lotus 1-2-3, SuperCalc, dBase, and R:Base.
|
| I met one of the Lotus cofounders on a group bicycling vacation
| tour in Europe. While legally blind at the time, he had a
| strategy for participating without crashing into anyone else.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| How else would I have shrunk 12 pages of high-school physics
| notes to fit on the allowed 3x5" (76x127mm) index card with 0.1
| pt font printed in raster mode at 600 dpi on an HP LaserJet 4? WP
| 5.2 for DOS. IIRC, Word for Windows at the time was inflexible in
| granularity of TrueType font sizes.
| pjmorris wrote:
| Late 80's: WP's 'Reveal Codes' helped me whip up some code that
| imported our application's screen definitions so I could use them
| directly in a specification document, impressing our customer. WP
| was an elegant weapon in a more civilized age.
| Jare wrote:
| Back in the late 80's I was feeling the kind of the world editing
| documents WYSIWYG with some Desktop Publishing package on my
| Atari ST, while my friends toiled away in the stone age of PC
| text mode with WordPerfect and that incredibly weird and
| primitive thing (to me): reveal codes.
|
| By the time I moved to PCs I could use Windows 3.x and MS Word,
| so I lived through college in the late 80s and early 90s without
| ever using WP. But I still learned to understand the meaning,
| reason and power of reveal codes.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| Funny you should mention the Atari ST. I heard WordPerfect did
| make it to the platform, but only for a short time. I wonder if
| it was any good?
| tombert wrote:
| This makes me sadder than I thought it would.
|
| My first computer [1] didn't have Microsoft Word on it, but it
| had WordPerfect installed with the OEM Windows. I've always had
| really horrid handwriting so I preferred to type out all my
| homework since I was twelve or so, so I had to use whatever I
| could to do so, and WordPerfect was there.
|
| I grew to actually really like it, and I used it for about two
| years until my hard drive crashed, I had to reinstall Windows,
| and then I installed StarOffice (which Google was giving away for
| free from Google Pack or something like that).
|
| Still, I liked WordPerfect, and looking at the history it seems
| like it was actually quite significant; a part of me feels like
| it should have been the de facto word processor instead of Word.
|
| [1] Not counting the hand me down Commodore 64 I got as a pretty
| young kid.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I somehow memorized most of the function key combos for
| wordperfect when in high school. And it wasn't like I was doing
| loads of reports for school. I guess it was a combination of
| there not being much else to do with the PC I had than playing
| the few (copied) games I had and fiddling with my copy of
| Wordperfect 5.1 (my neighbor who taught using it, supplied it).
| In any case, bored as I was, I explored a lot of the feature
| set and wrapped my head around features I would never use. Like
| creating mailings. I don't think I've ever actually had to
| create one. But it was there so I dove into it. For the post-
| internet generation, this is how you would create snail mail
| spam campaign in the early nineties. Merge a list of addressees
| with a letter with the right codes and then print personalized
| letters.
|
| I also had a hand me down commodore 64 before that. My uncle
| donated this when he got his first PC. I taught myself basic on
| that. And with a few peeks and pokes managed a simple game
| even. Alas, I had no disk drive and never thought to actually
| save my creations anywhere. Like on the tape drive I did have.
| The commodore 64 was great though. And my uncle bundled some
| introductory computer science stuff with it (a primer on bits
| and bytes) that along with the excellent C64 manual went a long
| way to got me into programming. My local library was useless. I
| had no access to information. There was no internet (at least
| not accessible to me; I had not even heard of it). But that C64
| manual got me curious and I had nothing better to do. I did not
| realize it at the time but that bit of commodore 64
| documentation and computer science intro is what changed my
| life.
|
| The PC I got after that was relatively boring because it did
| not include anything useful in terms of documentation. Starved
| of information, I dove into Wordperfect.
| tombert wrote:
| I probably would have done my homework on the C64 in the late
| 90's, where doing something like that on the C64 would still
| kind of be a viable thing (barely), but my dad didn't have
| the printer for it anymore. My parents had a computer and I
| did use it but mostly to play Descent.
|
| Once I got my own computer I started doing _everything_ on
| it, primarily because teachers genuinely could not read my
| handwriting. This sometimes required me to retype the
| worksheets in some capacity, but fortunately my teachers
| never had a problem with me doing that (maybe because they
| knew the alternative would be an unreadable mess). I learned
| algebra and calculus via the use of MathType (which Florida
| 's online school gave a free license and I took one class
| virtually), and it's to a point now where I can almost never
| find a pen when I need one because I type everything out,
| since I haven't really practiced writing with by hand for
| about twenty years. I genuinely get kind of uncomfortable
| doing any kind of math with pen and paper now, since I'm so
| used to MathType and now LaTeX.
|
| I never did a depth-first analysis of the features of
| WordPerfect, just the superficial stuff to make basic
| documents, but I did like using it. I don't remember any of
| the keystrokes anymore, but I did learn them when I was first
| using it.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| WordPerfect 5.x, running on DOS, is/was the best work processor
| ever. WordPerfect indeed.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| that's my experience as well
| vrinsd wrote:
| WordPerfect really was an outstanding word processor. Reveal
| codes (like many others here have pointed out) made "debuging"
| formatting issues relatively painless as was the "make it fit to
| a certain layout or size" feature. In an era when you didn't
| really have WYSIWYG they did an excellent job of enabling users
| to more or less get nice looking output without having to go to
| TeX.
|
| I remember it took a LONG time before there was a Windows version
| of WordPerfect which I think took a lot of their momentum away.
| Combine that with Microsoft basically giving away Office or
| bundling Word+Excel they succeeded in eroding market share from
| Lotus / WordPerfect.
|
| I think the Lotus Suite may have even pre-dated MSFT Office as a
| suite (not 100% certain) and as usual functionality was often
| superior or better implemented than MSFT's.
|
| Credit should also go to WordPerfect for making a Linux version
| in the 2000's before Linux desktop was as mature as it is today.
| Sadly they didn't continue this effort.
|
| I'm glad we have LibreOffice but it's frankly a clone of MSFT
| Office, the UI is very cluttered and it has the same "weirdisms"
| that Office has.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| The thing that got me was I used to use the second to last
| version of WordStar. Which had paragraph and page styles that
| you could import, edit and apply to text. When it became
| apparent that I couldn't be using Word Star to share documents
| anymore I tried WordPerfect and it was so annoying. You just
| want to set the paragraph style and start typing not play with
| tags. Eventually I just used Word. But styles in word wasn't
| nearly as obvious and straight foreword.
| seanlane wrote:
| On a podcast series covering some of the history of the
| intersection of business and technology in Utah (The 4th Node),
| the hosts had an episode with Bruce Bastian. Covers his
| background and the history of WordPerfect, for those curious to
| learn more and/or hear from Bruce himself:
|
| https://open.spotify.com/episode/1z0AEyFvPN30WFbQc317T6
| joelfried wrote:
| I've never really seen Word as anything other than inferior,
| having cut my teeth on WordPerfect.
|
| Others have posted their favorite shortcuts (and Reveal Codes
| truly was magical); my most used ones I haven't seen mentioned
| were Ctrl+Shift+F1 and Alt+Shift+F1. IIRC, those were spell check
| and thesaurus, respectively.
|
| RIP Bruce, you made the world a better place for millions.
| pjfin123 wrote:
| I know lawyers (who do a lot of very particular word processing)
| who kept using WordPerfect for decades after Microsoft Word had
| become the norm.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > I know lawyers
|
| Sorry, man.
|
| ---
|
| But does that mean you have some good lawyer jokes to share?
| kstrauser wrote:
| Why don't sharks bite lawyers?
|
| Professional courtesy.
|
| (I have a million of these from my lawyer friends.)
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Please, keep `em coming!
| kstrauser wrote:
| What's the difference between a catfish and a lawyer?
|
| One's a scum sucking bottom dweller and the other's a
| fish.
|
| (Stopping with this one. It's fun trading these with
| attorney buddies but I don't want someone to take them
| out of context as an opportunity to start lawyer
| bashing.)
| kstrauser wrote:
| My understanding was that a lot of courtroom document standards
| originated as "...like WordPerfect does it." For example,
| before word processing, no one expected documents to include
| word counts. When word processing came along, judges wanted to
| know much much they were going to be expected to read, so they
| started requiring the cover sheet to include the number of
| words. And because WP came along at the right time, its
| algorithm for counting words (do you include footnotes?
| Headers/footers? The word "page" on "page 23"? Section titles?)
| became the de facto way to do it, and judges being judges, some
| were persnickety about the numbers matching exactly and would
| throw a hissy if they didn't.
|
| Here's an example of someone bumping against that:
| https://www.wpuniverse.com/vb/forum/wordperfect/troubleshoot...
| dctoedt wrote:
| In the 1990s I loved the macro feature of WP 5.1. Macros and
| Reveal Codes let me write a basic Emacs keyboard emulator to
| accommodate my fingers' muscle memory.
|
| When Windows got to be a thing, my law firm considered switching
| to WP for Windows because WP 5.1 for DOS was the unquestioned
| industry standard for lawyers. But we surveyed our clients
| (almost all of them were big companies) and learned that _they_
| were going over to Word for Windows. So we said, "who gives a
| [hoot] what other law firms are using" and switched to Word for
| Windows. It was more than a bit of a downgrade from WP 5.1 in DOS
| starik36 wrote:
| Brings back great memories of laying out WordPerfect keyboard
| overlays at my University Computer Lab job back in the day. And
| helping students to Bold (F6) and Underline (F8) their documents.
|
| Good times.
| http://xahlee.info/kbd/wordperfect_shortcuts_strip.html
| asimpleusecase wrote:
| Word perfect was the best - Reveal Codes - was my ninja tool for
| making thing format just right.
| xbar wrote:
| F7
|
| Your changes have been saved, Bruce. RIP
| tssva wrote:
| WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS paired with a model F XT or AT layout
| (function keys on the side) keyboard has a special place in my
| heart. That combination along with a copious amount of weed got
| me through a lot of college papers in the late 80s.
| ggm wrote:
| Reveal codes was useful. The loss of screen realestate to the
| hint bar was sometimes annoying.
|
| I preferred runoff/[t]roff and vi
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