Bill gates experienced it on-stage at his win98 demo and I suspect the majority of windows users were already familiar with it at home too. It may just be for time-tracking or something…? For such devices, with custom controllers and software, it would be hard to upgrade, especially if the original manufacturer has gone many years ago. Therefore, I understand the use of legacy computers to control interface with certain equipment.
So… my guess would be, the old configuration would be to control some piece of custom hardware. Looks like two thirds of us had about the same idea and were all about the same amount of totally wrong.
Maybe wrong about the specific person Thom was referring to, but maybe not so wrong that the old operating system is still being used that way. There are still production DOS systems around. A lot of heads up displays we see around us run windows CE. Going around an deprecating things willy-nilly has a cost.
Namely, it causes people to stick with old versions of operating systems. Users were told they should upgrade regardless somehow. When Windows XP support expired, Windows users were told to upgrade regardless. PS: I understand the need to kill some XP driver compatibility in Vista which was due to happen anyway around that timeframe due to the move to bit , but there is no excuse for not shimming perfectly valid and public APIs. In my small shop we used to run the cashier system on an old win95 pentium2 computer till last year.
The latest fiscal policies ruled to have modern cash registers. Now we are suffering under a Win POS system basically a win 7 spin-off. Saw it many times with memories going bad and VRMs not able to keep up whenever a more demanding task was activated. The installer has a few issues, but if you had an up to date win95 system it could be possible to still boot it today.
My parents lost a nettop computer after about a year and a half, the desktop replacement lasted maybe 13 years before getting rid of it. Windows per se is not the problem but ancient proprietary boards are. Sometimes, it is quite hard to fix controller boards for mechanical hardware inside old equipments, like CNCs, specialized scanners and so on.
Many of the manufacturers that survive and are still on same segment business end up saying that almost all things must be replaced. About NASA, perhaps, they prefer old chips because the node size is bigger so, I suppose, they are more robust against the very aggressive ambient on space we had a chat about space radiation a long time ago and its effects on electronics. Anyway, capacitors going bad, electric migration and thermal fatigue is a problem for really old circuits.
Somehow, many of us forget that it is not because the moving parts are basically electrical on nature that wear off is not present, it is, only of a different kind. Fast, powerful, probably everything one would need even today, aside from track changes. Wowfunhappy on Sept 9, root parent prev next [—].
Tbqh, this is my experience in just about every rich text editor. It's starting. Outlook is doing some kind of "autocapitalisation" to me and I have no idea how to turn it off. Outlook has a setting to automatically capitalize the beginnings of sentences.
I turned that off. But it's been long ago, I forgot where that setting is. But I recall it was near the setting that enables smart quotes. They even do it on the web version of Outlook.
The setting to change it is 4 levels deep and two of the options are at the bottom of lists and labelled "more options". On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard. Well this has been better tech support than I usually get.
I haven't seen it with Word, which I use quite a lot, but there is one similar and extremely long-standing bug. So annoying. I am having flashbacks to late 90s Linux. One of the distros back then was Caldera OpenLinux. It had a Linux port of WordPerfect. It got a lot of criticism at the time for being nonfree. The port was so perfect! Not the Corel ones, but the one from SD Corp. I'd love to have that running again.
Wowfunhappy on Sept 9, root parent next [—]. Can it be run on modern Linux? I looked into it just now. Somebody has WordPerfect 8 binaries around. It requires libc5 - the c library that was common before glibc became common at the end of the 90s. And then needs X libraries that are compiled against libc5. Probably you could find an old Red Hat 5 or something and pull out those libraries to run on a recent kernel. I think WordPerfect 8 was where Corel rewrote it. It didn't work nearly as well.
I vaguely recall they switched from native to some kind of compatibility layer maybe Wine? I wonder if libc5 is so old that it has problems with docker. But I remember loki games being statically linked to avoid problems with dependencies. You only needed like linux syscalls and X11 for them to work.
The 'reveal codes' functionality is something that I always liked with WP, and that no other word processors seems to have implemented. Nota Bene is another text-based word processor from that era. It defaults to showing embedded formatting commands. The primary means of operation is via an integrated DOS-like command prompt.
Nota Bene although no longer text based still exists and is actively developed. Nota Bene used the XyWrite word processor engine. XyWrite was very popular in news rooms back in the day. JdeBP on Sept 9, root parent prev next [—]. That's a description that also matches Arnor's Protext. This is testing my memory but I think WordStar from the early to mid 80s had something similar.
I used it many decades ago briefly on the Amiga and it was more graphical but I'm only just getting to grips with it now. I have known lawyers and legal secretaries who just would not give up on WordPerfect, I think because of the footnotes. The two that I most recently had dealings with have since retired, but I'd be anything but surprised to learn that their are recent.
I liked WordPerfect well enough from 4. Version 6 on Windows was not good. Even a slow typist me could get ahead of the cursor. But at some point my employer switched to Word and I haven't been back. During the 4.
X and 5. X era at WP, the company paid very close attention to the needs of the legal market and WP could do things with a couple of keystrokes that would take 10 minutes with MS Word. WP also had a potent macro capability and a good macro editor as well. I was practicing law at this time and had created WP macros that made legal docs appear like magic. There was no e-filing and court clerks and judges could be more than a little picky about the formatting of the paper documents they received. The acquisition of WP by Novell was a disaster.
Way different corporate cultures and leadership styles. Ashton and Bastian had been generous with stock grants to key people, particularly on the technical side. Combine a brain drain with a Microsoft push for Windows and built-in integration with the first passable version of Word and you had a recipe for disaster.
Some of the WP people who remained claimed that MS had mislead them about Windows vs DOS roadmap and been slow in providing Windows info necessary for WP engineers to build a decent first release of WP for the new release of Windows, but I could never determine if this was what had really happened or just sour grapes because WP stumbled badly after the ownership change.
It was real. In the corel days they finally decided to port to actual win32 code and put aside the custom transpilation. Lawyer here. Still miss WP. I could do things in WP in the late 90's that I still can't do in Word. Word counts were a major part of this, if memory serves. I don't know if that would provide a significantly different experience than running the DOS version in dosemu though. I couldn't get it to work. Don't remember all the details but it seemed they cheated with some of the video routines and I mostly got a corrupted screen.
I didn't spend a lot of time on it, though, and I very well might have just not hit on the right incantations. Apparently the guy who made it also uses it to write his novels.
Doesn't RR Martin use the original Wordstar? Version 4 got me through the first couple years of college. Eventually I switched from English to Math and moved on to vi and the various roff markup tools and then LaTeX, but I think what ultimately killed the magic of that generation of WordPerfect was the change in keyboard layouts that moved the function keys from the left side to the top.
Before that when combined with Ctrl, Alt, and Shift there were 40 commands available just a pinky reach away, and it came with a cheat sheet card that fit neatly around them. Versions 4. I briefly updated to 5.
WorldMaker on Sept 9, root parent next [—]. IBM spun out their keyboard division decades back when they they spun out printers into Lexmark. Also, there's a wave of mechanical options from more recent companies like Das Keyboard or the various DIY kits with choose your Cherry switch adventures.
Reveal codes should be part of any rich text editor. Ever sat wondering why pressing return added a new bullet to a list rather than a gap to the text preceding it? I see it all the time while watching engineers and manager using tools like Jira, Confluence etc. Reveal codes would make it plainly obvious - the cursor was after the list start but before first bullet.
Nothing more delightful to work with than a requirements management tool whose wysiwyg editor changed the text of the bullet points when the indentation level changed. Never figured out what was going on, but there was somehow two different texts occupying the same line, and if you pressed tab to make the line deeper in the hierarchy it would display the other text.
Crontab on Sept 9, root parent prev next [—]. I think I know what you mean. I try to wrap at 80 col. As long as you're running nano in an 80 column wide window, that should work fine. Bud on Sept 9, root parent prev next [—].
BBEdit might be just right for you. Crontab on Sept 9, root parent next [—]. All the GUI text editors seem to wrap and unwrap just fine. Theodores on Sept 9, root parent prev next [—]. I prefer the tags as they describe my work.
Visually there is no evidence that something is a 'section' or an 'aside' but I make sure my words do have document structure, so a 'section' will probably have a 'h3' at the start of it. I wish there was a 'what you see is what you mean' editor that was visual but only allowed you to add HTML semantic elements. I can do diagrams in various ways including SVG that I just write out manually.
I am impressed that I am not alone in spurning drag and drop wonder gadgets. As much as I would like to give Wordprerfect a go, I feel the world has moved on from documents printed out as memos and put in pigeon holes. Word perfect 5 and 6 in many respects are still vastly superior to any version of word, especially when it comes to aligning text left and right, which are properly treated as line flow instead of a properties of a tab stop. Without leaving the keyboard I could easily align text on the same line to left aligned, centered and right aligned.
I honestly think wordperfect 5. Also I'd use WP 6. EDIT: On graphics, that's a solved problem. Everyone uses framebuffer today, even on obsolete chipsets it's doable. I use 'jstar' one of the 'joe' alter-egos which uses the same commands when programming in Linux. You'll love Wordtsar then. I used WordPerfect in my first job as a tech writer. It was beneficial to have a separation between writing and the layout done by desktop publishing systems.
As a programmer building websites, I do the same thing, writing in vim. Learning how to make your editor work for you is a great investment. I use troff groff under Linux. The really freaky thing is that you already have groff on your Mac -- it's installed by default.
What macros do you use? I have some simple programs that generate documents to print out, and I use LaTeX and a bunch of packages. It takes hundreds of megabytes of software with all the packages. I've long toyed with using the MOM macros but can't get motivated to rewrite my programs and learn troff. It used to bother me that groff doesn't support Unicode as far as I can tell but then realized that all I write is English so why am I fetishizing Unicode?
You can have UTF-8 with groff using the preconv [1] tool, just pass the "-k" or "-Kutf8" paramater. It will preprocess your source and replace Unicode symbols with its groff special character form.
Of course, the built-in standard fonts do not support many glyphs but it is no big thing to use a more Unicode friendly font like DejaVu Sans or Noto, check [2]. So this is my setup using MOM macros for nice typesetting.
But I fully agree on your last point, in the end I seldom need the Unicode universe for most of my documents. Get heirloom-doctools. It supports Unicode just fine. Just the plain. Plus "pic", I like that a lot. No way, you're right.
And of course it has a very detailed and well formatted man page. The one for troff even has tables. JdeBP on Sept 9, root parent next [—]. Little-known fact: groff more particularly grotty does colour, albeit that people have secretly turned this off for you. AndrewBissell on Sept 8, root parent prev next [—]. I believe George R. Martin has said he uses some kind of ancient word processing software to write the GoT novels. DOS machine, disconnected from the internet, running WordStar 4.
Might want to use the past tense of "to write", otherwise you're giving GRRM the benefit of the doubt when you say he is writing GoT novels How is this mode called where you can see and edit every control sequence you entered like bold and italics formatting? Beldin on Sept 8, root parent prev next [—].
While I've seen its real name now, for me this will always be the Under Water Screen. What about Protext from Arnor? JohnBooty on Sept 9, root parent prev next [—]. I have very fond memories of WP5.
I still have some Model-M keyboards, so I could really recreate the "glory days" if I wanted. I could print out the little F-key cheat sheet for the keyboard as well. What about Unicode? Lack of Unicode seems like a dealbreaker for a lot of use cases. Even if you're not using Unicode, seems like you'd eventually want to work with Unicode text.
As an engineer, a lot of the "word processing" I do involves cutting and pasting text from other sources citations, code samples, names, etc that tend to be chock full of non-ASCII characters.
Or has this been solved somehow? I see that there are various hacks involved in getting support for the Euro symbol. What about a general purposes solution? I know that WP5. Perhaps somebody's cooked up an emulation layer that translates Unicode into whatever it is that WP needs. Great idea, but how can one get their hands on this software nowadays? I can only assume it's not sold anywhere? You can still purchase it, but it's a lot of hoops to jump through! Odd, it works for me. It's also an odd little page.
It includes directions to buy it, if you already have a copy. If you don't have a copy, it includes some details on how to use eBay.
Who is Carol Reese? And how is she related to Corel and WordPerfect?! Former employee had a Inventory system based on dos6 but the hardware the pc and the barcode scanner was getting really old. If not there must be a very limited choice of hardware. Macs can't, but they are the only exception I know. Most modern computers have legacy BIOS support. Having disposed of a PowerMac G3 running System 9 this week, this strikes a chord with me.
I'm already regretting it. Despite the age and 'underpoweredness' of it, it was still quicker, still more responsive, and still subjectively nicer to use than anything modern.
I think Wordperfect may be the last time I enjoyed using a word processor. It was also maybe the first time I realized how important good design is. I couldn't you tell a specific reason it was better than Word, just that it always did what I expected.
I still use Word 97 for writing. I've tried many WPs, but haven't found anything better. I run it inside a VM and it is still faster and better than LibreOffice by a long shot. When I'm done writing, I paste the text into one of my blogs with IE6, which my sites still support. Like your style on this. I'm contemplating similar setup but going bit more oldschool with Word 6.
Integration is key for me and have to say my prior exp with Wine have been less than comforting working but just so, not long term functional feel. Wine doesn,t work great with Microsoft software, because they would take advantage of undocumented APIs, but W6W31 may be old and basic enough to work I would still take the VM route.
Nice that you are using WP on dosemu2 on Ubuntu on Windows. I once spoke to someone active in research into keeping data formats and programs available for very long time like centuries and I always thought it was a no-brainer because one could just run X on Y on Z on A on B on C to get ancient software D working. Allthough I also have to admit that this approach didn't work for my favorite game [0] but now that I'm googling, I does seem to work!
So someone got DirectX 9 or something working? Cryo Engine? This is impressive. My dad still uses Framework at times on an old machine. It just works and is perfect for his use case of large spreadsheets. While I support your travels with Wordperfect I wrote many term papers on that puppy , I can support the quote by the person you responded on twitter. He just showed arrogance and silliness when he said "All that was ever really needed by an OS or Office apps was already there 15 years ago.
Everything "invented" beyond that was just vanity changes with negligible long term added value, and constant moving around of UI to appear new and better. Change my mind. I'd almost try this, but I don't write documents enough - auto-correct in modern word processors infuriates me.
It almost never does what you want. I was a huge fan of Wordstar 6! Wrote so much with that thing I should try to see if I can get Wordstar running under dosemu2 I probably have a 3. I used WP6. It's hard to remember how that worked but in those days it seemed those things were only possible on Macs.
As I recall there was a big reference binder that documented the features. Perhaps only the printing no postscript would have been a problem. Certainly most of what I do in Excel could be done in SuperCalc. This reminds me that WordPerfect 6. That could be interesting. I am just very curious how to get a copy of the wordperfect 6. Can it be downloaded from Internet Archive? Those diagrams look powerful, it might even be even better than modern text editors for that :v.
George R. Is that you? There is Wordgrinder[0] and can export to LaTeX for printing. In classic Unix tradition, it looks way more plain than the screenshots of WordPerfect you posted :-P. Would you be so kind to post an example Postscript file generated by WordPerfect? Sure, I normally have this in my. Oh, nicely formatted and readable PostScript. I wish the Windows drivers could do that. Why did you update from 5.
It really is a beautiful program, in its own way. Could you link to an example of an output file? Nostalgia: Reveal Codes! BostonEnginerd on Sept 9, root parent next [—]. I had Office decide that checking the license at the start of an Internet-free 6hr flight was a good idea. At least I had brought a good book with me. I had that version of WordPerfect on my ! Source: The Next Web. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses.
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