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.<p>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.<p>What makes it worse is that there's always some hidden setting or configuration somewhere to blame, so you never really can blame Word.
If you're up for a read about how WordPerfect got started and rose to fame, <i>Almost Perfect</i> isn't a bad read. They battle Microsoft, OS/2 is mentioned a lot, lots of fun stuff.<p><a href="http://www.wordplace.com/ap/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wordplace.com/ap/</a>
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.<p>There are several fortuitous milestones in my career. Working with WP was probably the first major one.
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.
Novell purchased WordPerfect in 1994, and then sold it to Corel in 1996. So congratulations goes to Wordperfect Corporation itself, since this was 1992.
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.<p>WP also had pretty good support for the early laser printers, which had a <i>wide</i> 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.<p>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.
Its really fascinating to me to imagine what computing would be like if we used different types of protocols.<p>xterm also supports vector graphics <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010#Graphics_protocol" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010#Graphics_protoc...</a><p>I wonder if there could be some kind of revival of some of this stuff if we saw more support in modern tools.<p>Is there something like xterm for linux that is more up-to-date but includes Tektronix and sixel?<p>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.<p>It could also be streaming in data from multiple peers, content-oriented. Focus on efficient, small modules describing scenes and programs.<p>But the biggest concept is that we aren't waiting for millions or billions of bytes to load.
Three things from WP stuck in the mind<p>1) having a GUI top-bar of the commands. This was like P-Code and UCSD Pascal, it was the permanent hint feature, that followed your context. It was a big HCI design issue, and I think helped inform how people expect menus and bars to work<p>2) reveal markup. Huge. Being able to "see" the embedded control char elements of the textual display. Something I think other tools should have picked up on more. There's a mode in VIM which does something similar.<p>3) it was fast enough. for a small memory model. We're talking pre MMU chips here. Dos.
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.
<a href="https://youtu.be/0LTfGgqboE8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/0LTfGgqboE8</a>
I have a co-worker who was in charge of the build system at WordPerfect back in the early 90's. He worked on the the UNIX edition and he managed the whole workflow using a series of Makefiles linked across various shared drives.<p>I'm pretty good at shell scripts but this guy is a master at his craft. Give him any problem and within a few minute he's got a series of piped statements through awk and a few other well-known tools.
"Hit F10 to Save Changes"<p>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.<p>I was the Macintosh Guy, and never developed a muscle memory for the WordPerfect key bindings.<p>Thank you, WordPerfect, for giving me bizarre keyboard commands for my BIOS settings.
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.
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.<p>Any clue where I might find a copy?
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.<p>Does anyone recognize the software I'm describing?
I've been searching for this out of nostalgia.