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Came here to post that link! Amazingly, WP for DOS still receives love from various users! http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/#reason http://www.columbia.edu/

Came here to post that link! Amazingly, WP for DOS still receives love from various users! http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/#reason http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/#reason WordPerfect for DOS, in the opinion of many knowledgeable users, is still the greatest program ever written. Some of its features have not been matched even by the latest Windows software, and its interface remains unequaled for efficiency and elegance. Its support for multiple font formats has not been equaled by any other program or operating system, and its support for multiple alphabets, languages, and symbol sets has only been equaled by twenty-first-century versions of Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS.

gmfawcett 7y ago
Around 2005 or so, I met a religious scholar who still organized all his research in WordPerfect for DOS. He maintained volumes of notes and papers, collected over a decade or two. He refused to upgrade to the "obviously inferior" GUI versions. It was truly incredible to watch him navigate through his research. He moved like lightning through all that stuff! It was very much like watching an Emacs or Vim master. (At the time I thought: I should introduce this guy to Emacs and org-mode, he would feel right at home. But he had essentially built his own org-mode in WordPerfect already, so I doubt that he would have switched.) Props to you, Bill, wherever you are -- I hope that the blue WP background is still shining on your face. ----- This got me to thinking. Two things that my WP friend has in common with the Emacs/Vim crowd is that (a) his UI hasn't really changed in 20 years, and (b) the full feature set is discoverable and (macro) programmable. We tend to think that the latter point is more essential (it's the selling point of Emacs, the "programmable editor"), but we tend to overlook the value of the former point. We incur a cost due to the modern tendency to change application UIs on a whim -- either because of product switches ("this year's chat app") or actual UI changes to existing products (e.g., the Ribbon UI in the Office suite). It's the cost of lost opportunities for mastery. You can hone your Emacs or WP-DOS skills over a lifetime, and what you learned will never become obsolete, as long as you stick with that tool. But forced obsolescence has become a trend in application delivery, and so new generations of application users may never enjoy that sense of mastery. To me, this is very reminiscent of the "choose boring technology" article that was on HN just a couple days ago. You can spend your attention-credits on solving business problems, or you can spend them adapting to new tool interfaces every year or two.
IgniteTheSun 7y ago
I consider the version of WordPerfect for Dos that I was using in 1993 to be far superior to any other word processing system that I have ever used, bar none - and I have tried a lot of word processors over the years. WordPerfect was not my first text editing / word processing program - I had used others that I had liked for several years before I came across WordPerfect. I have been stuck using Microsoft Word at work for decades. If I recall correctly: Corel had agreed to rewrite WordPerfect in VBA as a condition for Microsoft to invest in it when it was on the ropes in the late 1990s. Once they did that, the quality went down quite a bit in my opinion. As I recall, WordPerfect once owned ~85% of the word processing market. WordPerfect was reasonably priced for students; I don't remember how much non-student licensing cost, but it did have a cost while Microsoft Word was free initially if I remember correctly.

gmfawcett 7y ago

Around 2005 or so, I met a religious scholar who still organized all his research in WordPerfect for DOS. He maintained volumes of notes and papers, collected over a decade or two. He refused to upgrade to the "obviously inferior" GUI versions. It was truly incredible to watch him navigate through his research. He moved like lightning through all that stuff! It was very much like watching an Emacs or Vim master. (At the time I thought: I should introduce this guy to Emacs and org-mode, he would feel right at home. But he had essentially built his own org-mode in WordPerfect already, so I doubt that he would have switched.) Props to you, Bill, wherever you are -- I hope that the blue WP background is still shining on your face. ----- This got me to thinking. Two things that my WP friend has in common with the Emacs/Vim crowd is that (a) his UI hasn't really changed in 20 years, and (b) the full feature set is discoverable and (macro) programmable. We tend to think that the latter point is more essential (it's the selling point of Emacs, the "programmable editor"), but we tend to overlook the value of the former point. We incur a cost due to the modern tendency to change application UIs on a whim -- either because of product switches ("this year's chat app") or actual UI changes to existing products (e.g., the Ribbon UI in the Office suite). It's the cost of lost opportunities for mastery. You can hone your Emacs or WP-DOS skills over a lifetime, and what you learned will never become obsolete, as long as you stick with that tool. But forced obsolescence has become a trend in application delivery, and so new generations of application users may never enjoy that sense of mastery. To me, this is very reminiscent of the "choose boring technology" article that was on HN just a couple days ago. You can spend your attention-credits on solving business problems, or you can spend them adapting to new tool interfaces every year or two.

IgniteTheSun 7y ago

I consider the version of WordPerfect for Dos that I was using in 1993 to be far superior to any other word processing system that I have ever used, bar none - and I have tried a lot of word processors over the years. WordPerfect was not my first text editing / word processing program - I had used others that I had liked for several years before I came across WordPerfect. I have been stuck using Microsoft Word at work for decades. If I recall correctly: Corel had agreed to rewrite WordPerfect in VBA as a condition for Microsoft to invest in it when it was on the ropes in the late 1990s. Once they did that, the quality went down quite a bit in my opinion. As I recall, WordPerfect once owned ~85% of the word processing market. WordPerfect was reasonably priced for students; I don't remember how much non-student licensing cost, but it did have a cost while Microsoft Word was free initially if I remember correctly.