[HN Gopher] A look back: WordPerfect on DOS (2023)
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A look back: WordPerfect on DOS (2023)
Author : TMWNN
Score : 15 points
Date : 2025-04-01 21:08 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (technicallywewrite.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (technicallywewrite.com)
| neverartful wrote:
| It was the best of times (WP5.1) and the worst of times (first
| versions for Windows). I used WordPerfect for DOS 5.1 extensively
| and it was a joy to use. It was not WYSIWYG, but it was fast,
| stable, and very capable. A couple of years later I used one of
| the early versions of WordPerfect for Windows (I don't recall the
| version number) and it was a complete disaster. It crashed very
| often. Hence, my love/hate with WordPerfect.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| The reason for the horrible Windows version was threefold: 1)
| Culture, 2) Hubris and 3) OS/2.
|
| From _Almost Perfect_ [1], the book linked to in the article:
|
| > _WordPerfect Corporation was not a platform for personal
| achievement, a career ladder to other opportunities, or a
| challenging opportunity for personal improvement. The company
| did not put the needs of the individual ahead of its own. The
| company was not concerned about an employee 's personal
| feelings, except as they related to the company's well-being._
|
| > _WordPerfect Corporation was not intended to be a social club
| for the unproductive. While other companies might condone many
| personal or social activities at the office, ours did not.
| Things like celebrating birthdays, throwing baby showers,
| collecting for gifts, selling Tupperware or Avon, managing
| sports tournaments, running betting pools, calling home to keep
| a romance alive or hand out chores to the children, gossiping
| or flirting with co-workers, getting a haircut, going to a
| medical or dental appointment, running to the cafeteria for a
| snack, coming in a little late or leaving a little early,
| taking Friday afternoon off, and griping about working
| conditions were all inappropriate when done on company time.
| Even though these activities were condoned by many businesses
| across the country, we felt there was no time for them at
| WordPerfect Corporation._
|
| Sounds like a lovely place to work! Oof. Compare this to Apple
| or Microsoft or a ton of other Silicon Valley companies. It's
| no wonder they couldn't find developers:
|
| > _In January [1990] Microsoft offered to make us a beta test
| site for Windows 3.0. We accepted their generous offer, but did
| little more than look Windows over. In hindsight, it is easy to
| see we should have done much more right away. At the time, we
| could justify not doing a Windows 2.0 version in favor of
| completing WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, but it is now difficult to
| defend our further delays. Unfortunately, we did not have any
| experienced Windows programmers inside the company to form a
| development team, and there were not many outside the company
| to recruit._
|
| > _In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears
| became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning
| in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world
| wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft
| Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received
| good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had
| looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous
| and threatening. IBM 's strength and size were no protection.
| Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm._
|
| > _May 31, 1990 was a sad day in WordPerfect Corporation 's
| history. I wrote a press release announcing that we were
| postponing our OS/2 product, so we could produce a Windows
| version of WordPerfect as quickly as possible. I wrote, "While
| we still are strong supporters of OS/2, we have decided to test
| and release the Windows version of WordPerfect before the OS/2
| version. The reasons for the schedule change have to do with
| the expected delays in version 2.0 of Presentation Manager and
| particular requests from our customers. This change should move
| up the release of our Windows product by three to four months
| and will delay our release of a PM product by four or five
| months."_
|
| The book is free online and pretty interesting if you like
| histories of early computing. It's definitely on the list with
| the more famous ones like Soul of a New Machine.
|
| 1. http://www.wordplace.com/ap/
| dlachausse wrote:
| An interesting thing about WordPerfect was that most of the
| keyboard shortcuts were built around the row of function keys at
| the top of the keyboard, so they were difficult to remember,
| compared to modern keyboard shortcuts. For this reason, nearly
| every WordPerfect user I knew had a little piece of plastic or
| laminated paper that they placed above the row of function keys
| that listed all of the keyboard shortcuts on it to help them
| remember.
| mbreese wrote:
| The shortcut strip came in the box! And it was all based on
| F1-F12 and modifier keys alt/ctrl/shift. It was a complete pain
| to learn, but once you knew a few key ones (F10 was save?), it
| was very fast to work with. I wasn't very old, but I remember
| having the same kind of muscle memory then with WP5.0/5.1 that
| I do now with vim. Autosave wasn't a thing, so hitting F10
| often was just done out of habit.
|
| But, by far the best part was that you could reveal all of the
| formatting codes, so you could see exactly how something was
| styled. It was much like editing HTML by hand, and easier to
| figure out how something was styled than with almost any
| WYSIWYG.
|
| Here's a photo of what it looked like:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1aemcxc/80s_word_perf...
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Losing Reveal Codes was the worst part of Microsoft forcing
| Word down everyone's throat. Word positively sucks in
| comparison to this day. No, the little "paragraph" icon isn't
| enough. Reveal Codes showed you in granular form what was
| going on so you could fix what was borked, instead of ping-
| ponging back and forth in AutoComplete hell.
|
| And it wasn't just on the DOS version. WordPerfect for
| Windows has/had it too along with the modern WYSIWYG UI.
| dogman1050 wrote:
| I don't remember the details, but the function key shortcuts
| changed enough between WP4.2 and 5.1 to slow me down. May
| have been the first time I grumbled about a SW update
| breaking my workflow. Some things never change.
| bluGill wrote:
| The function keys were no more difficult to use than any other
| key shortcut. However since keyboards had that space they put
| the chart there and so could find the less commonly used
| commands. Everyone quickly learned which key was save, but
| there were many many others that they didn't use and so they
| didn't know - but if they wanted it they could look at the
| chart and find it.
|
| GUIs are more discoverable (when done well), but DOS didn't
| really have a GUI option, so this was a second best. VI and
| emacs users sometimes print shortcut charts as well.
| dlachausse wrote:
| Most modern keyboard shortcuts are mnemonic such as Ctrl-S
| for Save, which makes them easier to remember than function
| keys.
| snotrockets wrote:
| Assuming you speak English.
| Rygian wrote:
| At some point OpenOffice decided that the shortcut to
| save was Ctrl-G because my locale was set to Spanish
| ("guardar").
| mmooss wrote:
| > function keys were no more difficult to use than any other
| key shortcut
|
| That's a bold statement. I think most users would disagree,
| and the voted with their feet/fingers, and UI designers seem
| to agree.
|
| Why? Some guesses: Nothing about F# indicates what it does,
| making it hard to learn; ctrl+S makes sense. And after you
| learn it, few can touch type function keys which means, 1)
| you have to look away from the document and, 2) there's much
| less muscle memory involved.
| bluGill wrote:
| ui designers moved graphicics for good reason. conrotl-s
| makes sense - now what is the shortcut that makes sense for
| any of the other thousand things someone wants to do in
| word processor? There will always be some that don't make
| sense.
| brudgers wrote:
| WordPerfect shipped with printed templates/overlays and a
| wonderful printed manual.
|
| There weren't any standard key combinations yet...except maybe
| Wordstar?... because word processors still had very very low
| adoption and many many users spent all day in WordPerfect so
| there was a lot of muscle memory.
|
| Back then software was optimized for expertise not casual
| use...and priced accordingly. WordPerfect was about four
| hundred 1980's dollars a seat, not 99p in an app store.
| zabzonk wrote:
| As a function key hater - hated it. WordStar for me!
|
| Does anyone use function keys for word processors on modern
| interfaces? As far as I can see they are all used for
| media/screen controls.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| WordPerfect was like vi: forbidding entry point, difficult key
| bindings, and a joy to use once you got it.
|
| Word for Windows even had a mode that replicated the plain blue
| screen and behavior of WP5.1 for a few years, which I still miss.
|
| WP also ran on the UNIX of the day, with look and feel very much
| like the DOS version. Tavis Ormandy got it working on Linux[0].
|
| [0] https://github.com/taviso/wpunix?tab=readme-ov-file
| mmooss wrote:
| > WordPerfect was like vi: forbidding entry point, difficult
| key bindings, and a joy to use once you got it.
|
| Maybe in that way, but I think it's misleading to say a every
| keyboard-based non-GUI editor is essentially similar. Vi's
| appeal is the muscle memory of complex commands, because of the
| moded keyboard - one mode being character insert, the other
| being commands.
|
| Didn't WP use function keys + accelerator keys? That's almost
| the opposite of Vi's efficiency and muscle-memory.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I think it's interesting how modern TUI apps never seem to look
| as nice as mid-80s DOS apps like WordPerfect or Lotus 123. I
| wonder if it's the blue background.
| lmz wrote:
| I wonder if it's "responsive design" i.e. variable terminal
| sizes versus the fixed size DOS terminal.
| ttul wrote:
| I remember sitting in front of WordPerfect for many, many hours
| as a teenager, writing essays and whatnot for school. We were
| fortunate to have an HP LaserJet at home that my dad used for
| work. The output looked great and WordPefect's interface wasn't
| terribly hard to get used to.
|
| My more sophisticated friend had Windows 3.1 and blew my mind
| with the WISIWYG capabilities of early versions of Word.
|
| Ironically, I now do much of my writing in vi.
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