15 ms·

WordPerfect for UNIX (1992)

243 points by taviso 4y ago

h2odragon 4y ago
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. WP also had pretty good support for the early laser printers, which had a wide 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. 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.
- taviso 4y ago
  It's not surprising that it's possible, sixels are basically just a canvas. It's that they've always been a novelty, very rarely used or supported. Yet somehow they made it into a commercial product in 1992 -- that's surprising! I think sixels are seeing some resurgence today, terminals are fast enough now to use it to render video. I wonder if GNU ls will add ls --thumbnails :)
- acomjean 4y ago
  Oh yeah, because it was a MSDOS (or unix) program, it had a lot of printer drivers built it, the OS not providing those. I remember working for the Government and having to use carbon paper in the 1990s, which meant using the "daisy wheel" printer[1]. Somehow I selected the wrong printer, and every line printed backwards. Strange times. I don't think this sixel graphics would have printed.. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing
  - anthk 4y ago
    Almost any printer supported PostScript and a parallel port. On Unix you could cat a PS file (supported since groff) to the parallel port at /dev and you were done. Today you can do similar hacks with netcat, the printing port and PDF files.
    - h2odragon 4y ago
      Very few non-Apple printers spoke Postscript, certainly at the beginning of the laser printer era. It was an extra cost option available for some printers, which was only bought by people using Apple or the few Unix freaks. And presumably Don Lancaster.
- therealcamino 4y ago
  If you read the sixel Wikipedia page, it sounds like sixel actually originated as a format to drive DEC's dot matrix printers. So if WP had an LA210 driver, maybe they were most of the way there already.
rubinlinux 4y ago
Novell purchased WordPerfect in 1994, and then sold it to Corel in 1996. So congratulations goes to Wordperfect Corporation itself, since this was 1992.
- bfgoodrich 4y ago
snapetom 4y ago
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. There are several fortuitous milestones in my career. Working with WP was probably the first major one.
- eterps 4y ago
  Reveal codes [1] was such a useful feature, I really miss it in 'modern' word processing apps. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Word has "show formatting" which .... is a very poor substitute but can sometimes help. I find Word becomes much more manageable if you religiously use styles instead of ad-hoc formatting.
    - pimlottc 4y ago
      > I find Word becomes much more manageable if you religiously use styles instead of ad-hoc formatting. I agree with this tip but it requires very rigorous discipline and is basically impossible to maintain if you're working with any collaborators.
      - actually_a_dog 4y ago
        Agreed. At that point, LaTeX not only all but requires you to use styles, .tex files are text-based for easy version control. I wouldn't necessarily say I'd endorse LaTeX for collaboration per se among people who don't normally use it, but I think it points the way toward what a good collaborative writing tool would look like.
        4y ago
smm11 4y ago
And now "View Source" is like staring at the night sky trying to see what the fancy satellites do.
jhallenworld 4y ago
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.
- georgia_peach 4y ago
  mintty (cygwin) supports sixel & iTerm2 format inline png/gif/jpg https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html
  - jhallenworld 4y ago
    Yeah, mintty is too difficult (the user would need to use picocom or something to connect to the serial port). iTerm2 is MAC only...
    - georgia_peach 4y ago
      RLogin also supports sixel & iTerm2 formats, and has built-in serial support. The default is in Japanese, but they have language packs. https://kmiya-culti.github.io/RLogin/ https://kmiya-culti.github.io/RLogin/
      - jhallenworld 4y ago
        Rlogin looks promising. One other requirement I forgot is that it needs to support x/y/z-modem, and Rlogin does.
- junon 4y ago
  There have been pushes for sixel for ages. I just don't think it's going to happen.
  - georgia_peach 4y ago
    It's okay for low-color/solid-run images, terrible for everything else. Nachman's image mime blobs (iTerm2 style) is the superior approach. mintty/mlterm/rlogin/wezterm already support it. Kitty has an (incompatible) variant--same idea, but delivered in chunks.
bluedino 4y ago
If you're up for a read about how WordPerfect got started and rose to fame, Almost Perfect isn't a bad read. They battle Microsoft, OS/2 is mentioned a lot, lots of fun stuff. http://www.wordplace.com/ap/ http://www.wordplace.com/ap/
- ExtremisAndy 4y ago
  Second this recommendation. Fun read! I know a lot of HN folks won’t be as impressed as I was, but I had no idea they wrote the first several versions of WordPerfect for DOS in assembly. To me, at least, THAT is impressive. I wouldn’t even know where to begin to start a project like that in assembly.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    You start with a macro assembler - MASM being an example - which lets you handle many things in a surprisingly high-level manner.
  - linguae 4y ago
    There was a Macintosh word processor named WriteNow that was a major competitor to MacWrite back in the 1980s and was also written in assembly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow
    - jhbadger 4y ago
      I'd say most software on personal computers prior to the late 1980s was written in assembly. Compilers at the time were terrible at optimization and you could really tell the difference as a user between a compiled program and one written in hand-crafted assembly.
    - bigbizisverywyz 4y ago
      I have a vague recollection that there used to be a Word Processor for the Atari ST with the same name, but I could be wrong.
- 4y ago
ilaksh 4y ago
Its really fascinating to me to imagine what computing would be like if we used different types of protocols. xterm also supports vector graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010#Graphics_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010#Graphics_protoc... I wonder if there could be some kind of revival of some of this stuff if we saw more support in modern tools. Is there something like xterm for linux that is more up-to-date but includes Tektronix and sixel? 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. It could also be streaming in data from multiple peers, content-oriented. Focus on efficient, small modules describing scenes and programs. But the biggest concept is that we aren't waiting for millions or billions of bytes to load.
- jrm4 4y ago
  Absolutely, especially if you watch (and lament) the absolute mess that is GUI programming in Linux. I feel like something like https://github.com/BashGui/easybashgui https://github.com/BashGui/easybashgui (in terms of user/creator experience) shouldn't be that hard.
- georgia_peach 4y ago
  The achilles heel of these old inline display protocols is that there's little to no reporting from the client side as to dimension/resolution/resize/interaction... And to fix this in a performant way, it would need the ability to handle as many of those events as possible on the client side, hence some kind of VM & endless mitigations for it--chrome all over again. > something like xterm for linux that is more up-to-date Dickey put a lot of effort into xterm--especially on the correct emulation of old protocols like tektronics. The GPU-accelerateds may be the new hotness, but I don't think many of those devs are interested in software archaeology like tektronics & sixel.
- ok123456 4y ago
  Back in high school in the late 90s, I bought a pallet of Tektronix 4211 terminals [1] for about $40 from a local place that resold old computer junk. All in total there were about 10 of the terminal base units and three, for the time, extremely large 21" monitors. I figured this came from an engineering firm, since these terminals also came with some digitizer pads. I thought they were X-Terminals and was very disappointed that I couldn't get them do anything beyond being text terminals. It was only recently that I discovered that they were actually intended to be used with this proprietary graphics protocol. [1] Exactly like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/1994._Shelly_Stelling_with_Tektronix_4211_graphics_terminal._Regional_Office%2C_Portland%2C_Oregon._%2827276702499%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/1994._Sh...
meebee 4y ago
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.
- lproven 4y ago
  Not that I know of, because WordPerfect is still a living product, still being maintained and actively sold on Windows. https://www.wordperfect.com/en/ https://www.wordperfect.com/en/ The only free-as-in-beer things I know are: * WordPerfect Editor for DOS -- that was freeware back in the day. Runs in DOSemu. * WordPerfect 3.5 for classic MacOS. Can be emulated on a modern Mac. * WordPerfect 8.x for Linux. This is a graphical X11 app, the last version of an abandoned product line. I've blogged on how to install it, and someone posted my blog post and direct links to the install scripts above. Because it's a living product, I suspect it's not legally feasible to clone it. Its owners might well sue.
  - otk_010199 4y ago
    A potential fourth option for free as in beer WordPerfect if you're comfortable with Apple II/Apple IIGS emulation. https://gswv.apple2.org.za/a2zine/Sel/WordPerfectPD.html https://gswv.apple2.org.za/a2zine/Sel/WordPerfectPD.html (II/GS WordPerfect homepage) https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.apple2/c/LFkDFMYo_LQ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.apple2/c/LFkDFMYo_LQ (original release announcement) https://www.callapple.org/vintage-apple-computers/apple-iigs/wordperfect-2-21a-for-the-apple-iigs-updated/ https://www.callapple.org/vintage-apple-computers/apple-iigs... (Y2K patched version) n.b. since this is marked as "dedicated to the public domain" on the release website, I wonder whether it would be legally permissible to disassemble these versions, produce listings, and use them to produce a FOSS cross platform descendant (keeping in mind the usual issues around trademark law)
    - lproven 4y ago
      OK, that's good to know! Also good on SSI/WordPerfect Corp/Corel for putting old releases out there for free. In case anyone read my Register story on this: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_for_linux/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_... ... a good point was made in the comments: Borland's Sprint had a very good emulation of the WordPerfect UI, as it also did of WordStar, MS Word, and others. Sadly for Borland, its amazing emulate-any-other-UI feature came out just around the same time that CUA came along and forced all the DOS apps to harmonize their UIs onto a common standard. The other killer feature of Sprint was the continuous background saving -- also foxed by DOS getting disk-caching as standard right around the same time. Saying that, it remains an important app. AIUI underneath, Sprint was based on an EMACS clone. Mark of the Unicorn -- still trading, remarkably -- wrote MINCE (MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs) and the separate SCRIBBLE text formatter. MINCE + Scribble evolved into PerfectWriter. That did quite well in its day; I tried it on a BBC Micro with a Torch Z80 2nd processor. PerfectWriter evolved into FinalWord, again quite a success in its day. I've read several books written entirely in FinalWord. Borland bought FinalWord 2 and renamed it Sprint. ISTM that if the text-formatting part were outsourced to Pandoc or something, or some monstrous Electron thing, the UI and continuous-save parts of Sprint could be re-implemented in GNU Emacs if someone had the will to do it. ErgoEmacs is a good start on the UI front: forget emulating WordPerfect etc. today. (Maybe provide WordStar keystrokes for the grumpy old gits.) Just put a _good_ CUA UI on Emacs, and give it the ability to handle basic, Markdown-style formatting, and a continuous save and live wordcount feature, and I suspect a lot of people would be interested. But that isn't what the Emacs folks want.
laurensr 4y ago
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. Does anyone recognize the software I'm describing? I've been searching for this out of nostalgia.
- AlanYx 4y ago
  WordPerfect 6 did have a graphical mode with a white background that looked a lot like MS Word, even when running on DOS. I can't remember, but it might even have been the default if you had a VGA card. CTRL-F3 would flip you back to the old blue background character mode interface.
- taviso 4y ago
  WordPerfect 6 did have an optional graphical mode that wrote directly to the framebuffer, I've never used it though! Is it possible you're thinking of that? There is a screenshot of it on this page: https://thewanderingnerd.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/corel-wordperfect-6-2-for-dos-a-look-back/ https://thewanderingnerd.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/corel-word...
ballenf 4y ago
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. 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. What makes it worse is that there's always some hidden setting or configuration somewhere to blame, so you never really can blame Word.
- EEMac 4y ago
  > What makes it worse is that there's always some hidden setting or configuration somewhere to blame, so you never really can blame Word. Yes you can.
- petilon 4y ago
  > so you never really can blame Word Absolutely, you can. Microsoft has long stopped improving the basic word processing features. When there is no competition Microsoft stops improving their products.
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    When there is no competition Microsoft stops improving their products. Coincidentally, at this very moment I am re-creating an old paper form for another department in the company. They need it as a PDF. The people from the department sent me their best effort as a Word document. It's a disaster of mismatched styles, misaligned boxes, things that get cut off for no discernible reason, and stuff that won't print right because it's past Word's margins. I'm almost done re-creating it in Pages, from which I'll output a PDF. It's gone swimmingly. Pages isn't yet a replacement for every single little thing that Word does, but for the things it does do, it works well, quickly, predictably, and fast. But that may be Word's downfall: It took the kitchen sink route and became a mess. Pages is a good basic word processor for those who are interested in processing words. It's less "powerful" at doing all the thousand other things that people use Word for that they should probably do in Acrobat.
shrubble 4y ago
The notcurses project, notcurses.com has some pretty wild demos of what can be done with sixel etc.
frognumber 4y ago
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. Any clue where I might find a copy?
- haunter 4y ago
  Corel Linux 1.2 which had WP 8.1 included https://archive.org/details/corel_linux_1.2 https://archive.org/details/corel_linux_1.2 Then you can install it easily on modern distros either by script or manually http://www.xwp8users.com/wp81script.htm http://www.xwp8users.com/wp81script.htm http://www.xwp8users.com/wp81else.htm http://www.xwp8users.com/wp81else.htm
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
watersb 4y ago
"Hit F10 to Save Changes" 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. I was the Macintosh Guy, and never developed a muscle memory for the WordPerfect key bindings. Thank you, WordPerfect, for giving me bizarre keyboard commands for my BIOS settings.
retrocryptid 4y ago
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. https://youtu.be/0LTfGgqboE8 https://youtu.be/0LTfGgqboE8
- csdvrx 4y ago
  That's also my main usecase: doing plots with gnuplot A few years ago, it wasn't compiled by default in the debian packages so I released binaries: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-gnuplot https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-gnuplot
  - dingosity 4y ago
    sweet!
  - anthk 4y ago
    Maxima and Gnuplot are the ultimate lightweight math CAS+plotter combo for legacy devices such as Atom netbooks. No need for a monster like Sagemath.
abotsis 4y ago
I'll be damned - printing to postscript even works!
WillAdams 4y ago
The NeXTstep version was quite nice, especially for having been ported in some six weeks, or so the story goes.
ggm 4y ago
Three things from WP stuck in the mind 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 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. 3) it was fast enough. for a small memory model. We're talking pre MMU chips here. Dos.
paultopia 4y ago
so... like... how hard would it be to take the author's patches and make them mac-compatible...? (assuming an intel chip)
- lproven 4y ago
  You could do that. Another option: run a Linux VM and run it in that. But it will be considerably easier to run the DOS version of WordPerfect on macOS. This WPDOS page describes 4 different ways to run WordPerfect on macOS: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/sitemap.html http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/sitemap.html 1. Use the vDos emulator to run WordPerfect for DOS. 2. Use the DOSBox-X emulator to run WordPerfect for DOS. 3. Run the freeware WordPerfect for classic macOS under SheepShaver or QEMU 4. Run the Windows version of WordPerfect via WINE. To which, from another comment in this thread, I would add: 5. Run an Apple ][ or ][GS emulator and run the freeware WP for Apple ][.
jonathanoliver 4y ago
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. 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.

243 points by taviso 4y ago

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. WP also had pretty good support for the early laser printers, which had a wide 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. 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.

taviso 4y ago
It's not surprising that it's possible, sixels are basically just a canvas. It's that they've always been a novelty, very rarely used or supported. Yet somehow they made it into a commercial product in 1992 -- that's surprising! I think sixels are seeing some resurgence today, terminals are fast enough now to use it to render video. I wonder if GNU ls will add ls --thumbnails :)
acomjean 4y ago
Oh yeah, because it was a MSDOS (or unix) program, it had a lot of printer drivers built it, the OS not providing those. I remember working for the Government and having to use carbon paper in the 1990s, which meant using the "daisy wheel" printer[1]. Somehow I selected the wrong printer, and every line printed backwards. Strange times. I don't think this sixel graphics would have printed.. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing
- anthk 4y ago
  Almost any printer supported PostScript and a parallel port. On Unix you could cat a PS file (supported since groff) to the parallel port at /dev and you were done. Today you can do similar hacks with netcat, the printing port and PDF files.
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    Very few non-Apple printers spoke Postscript, certainly at the beginning of the laser printer era. It was an extra cost option available for some printers, which was only bought by people using Apple or the few Unix freaks. And presumably Don Lancaster.
therealcamino 4y ago
If you read the sixel Wikipedia page, it sounds like sixel actually originated as a format to drive DEC's dot matrix printers. So if WP had an LA210 driver, maybe they were most of the way there already.

rubinlinux 4y ago

Novell purchased WordPerfect in 1994, and then sold it to Corel in 1996. So congratulations goes to Wordperfect Corporation itself, since this was 1992.

bfgoodrich 4y ago

snapetom 4y ago

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. There are several fortuitous milestones in my career. Working with WP was probably the first major one.

eterps 4y ago
Reveal codes [1] was such a useful feature, I really miss it in 'modern' word processing apps. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes
- bombcar 4y ago
  Word has "show formatting" which .... is a very poor substitute but can sometimes help. I find Word becomes much more manageable if you religiously use styles instead of ad-hoc formatting.
  - pimlottc 4y ago
    > I find Word becomes much more manageable if you religiously use styles instead of ad-hoc formatting. I agree with this tip but it requires very rigorous discipline and is basically impossible to maintain if you're working with any collaborators.
    - actually_a_dog 4y ago
      Agreed. At that point, LaTeX not only all but requires you to use styles, .tex files are text-based for easy version control. I wouldn't necessarily say I'd endorse LaTeX for collaboration per se among people who don't normally use it, but I think it points the way toward what a good collaborative writing tool would look like.
      - 4y ago

smm11 4y ago

And now "View Source" is like staring at the night sky trying to see what the fancy satellites do.

jhallenworld 4y ago

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.

georgia_peach 4y ago
mintty (cygwin) supports sixel & iTerm2 format inline png/gif/jpg https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html
- jhallenworld 4y ago
  Yeah, mintty is too difficult (the user would need to use picocom or something to connect to the serial port). iTerm2 is MAC only...
  - georgia_peach 4y ago
    RLogin also supports sixel & iTerm2 formats, and has built-in serial support. The default is in Japanese, but they have language packs. https://kmiya-culti.github.io/RLogin/ https://kmiya-culti.github.io/RLogin/
    - jhallenworld 4y ago
      Rlogin looks promising. One other requirement I forgot is that it needs to support x/y/z-modem, and Rlogin does.
junon 4y ago
There have been pushes for sixel for ages. I just don't think it's going to happen.
- georgia_peach 4y ago
  It's okay for low-color/solid-run images, terrible for everything else. Nachman's image mime blobs (iTerm2 style) is the superior approach. mintty/mlterm/rlogin/wezterm already support it. Kitty has an (incompatible) variant--same idea, but delivered in chunks.

bluedino 4y ago

If you're up for a read about how WordPerfect got started and rose to fame, Almost Perfect isn't a bad read. They battle Microsoft, OS/2 is mentioned a lot, lots of fun stuff. http://www.wordplace.com/ap/ http://www.wordplace.com/ap/

ExtremisAndy 4y ago
Second this recommendation. Fun read! I know a lot of HN folks won’t be as impressed as I was, but I had no idea they wrote the first several versions of WordPerfect for DOS in assembly. To me, at least, THAT is impressive. I wouldn’t even know where to begin to start a project like that in assembly.
- bombcar 4y ago
  You start with a macro assembler - MASM being an example - which lets you handle many things in a surprisingly high-level manner.
- linguae 4y ago
  There was a Macintosh word processor named WriteNow that was a major competitor to MacWrite back in the 1980s and was also written in assembly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow
  - jhbadger 4y ago
    I'd say most software on personal computers prior to the late 1980s was written in assembly. Compilers at the time were terrible at optimization and you could really tell the difference as a user between a compiled program and one written in hand-crafted assembly.
  - bigbizisverywyz 4y ago
    I have a vague recollection that there used to be a Word Processor for the Atari ST with the same name, but I could be wrong.
4y ago

ilaksh 4y ago

Its really fascinating to me to imagine what computing would be like if we used different types of protocols. xterm also supports vector graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010#Graphics_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010#Graphics_protoc... I wonder if there could be some kind of revival of some of this stuff if we saw more support in modern tools. Is there something like xterm for linux that is more up-to-date but includes Tektronix and sixel? 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. It could also be streaming in data from multiple peers, content-oriented. Focus on efficient, small modules describing scenes and programs. But the biggest concept is that we aren't waiting for millions or billions of bytes to load.

jrm4 4y ago
Absolutely, especially if you watch (and lament) the absolute mess that is GUI programming in Linux. I feel like something like https://github.com/BashGui/easybashgui https://github.com/BashGui/easybashgui (in terms of user/creator experience) shouldn't be that hard.
georgia_peach 4y ago
The achilles heel of these old inline display protocols is that there's little to no reporting from the client side as to dimension/resolution/resize/interaction... And to fix this in a performant way, it would need the ability to handle as many of those events as possible on the client side, hence some kind of VM & endless mitigations for it--chrome all over again. > something like xterm for linux that is more up-to-date Dickey put a lot of effort into xterm--especially on the correct emulation of old protocols like tektronics. The GPU-accelerateds may be the new hotness, but I don't think many of those devs are interested in software archaeology like tektronics & sixel.
ok123456 4y ago
Back in high school in the late 90s, I bought a pallet of Tektronix 4211 terminals [1] for about $40 from a local place that resold old computer junk. All in total there were about 10 of the terminal base units and three, for the time, extremely large 21" monitors. I figured this came from an engineering firm, since these terminals also came with some digitizer pads. I thought they were X-Terminals and was very disappointed that I couldn't get them do anything beyond being text terminals. It was only recently that I discovered that they were actually intended to be used with this proprietary graphics protocol. [1] Exactly like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/1994._Shelly_Stelling_with_Tektronix_4211_graphics_terminal._Regional_Office%2C_Portland%2C_Oregon._%2827276702499%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/1994._Sh...

meebee 4y ago

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.

lproven 4y ago
Not that I know of, because WordPerfect is still a living product, still being maintained and actively sold on Windows. https://www.wordperfect.com/en/ https://www.wordperfect.com/en/ The only free-as-in-beer things I know are: * WordPerfect Editor for DOS -- that was freeware back in the day. Runs in DOSemu. * WordPerfect 3.5 for classic MacOS. Can be emulated on a modern Mac. * WordPerfect 8.x for Linux. This is a graphical X11 app, the last version of an abandoned product line. I've blogged on how to install it, and someone posted my blog post and direct links to the install scripts above. Because it's a living product, I suspect it's not legally feasible to clone it. Its owners might well sue.
- otk_010199 4y ago
  A potential fourth option for free as in beer WordPerfect if you're comfortable with Apple II/Apple IIGS emulation. https://gswv.apple2.org.za/a2zine/Sel/WordPerfectPD.html https://gswv.apple2.org.za/a2zine/Sel/WordPerfectPD.html (II/GS WordPerfect homepage) https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.apple2/c/LFkDFMYo_LQ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.apple2/c/LFkDFMYo_LQ (original release announcement) https://www.callapple.org/vintage-apple-computers/apple-iigs/wordperfect-2-21a-for-the-apple-iigs-updated/ https://www.callapple.org/vintage-apple-computers/apple-iigs... (Y2K patched version) n.b. since this is marked as "dedicated to the public domain" on the release website, I wonder whether it would be legally permissible to disassemble these versions, produce listings, and use them to produce a FOSS cross platform descendant (keeping in mind the usual issues around trademark law)
  - lproven 4y ago
    OK, that's good to know! Also good on SSI/WordPerfect Corp/Corel for putting old releases out there for free. In case anyone read my Register story on this: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_for_linux/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_... ... a good point was made in the comments: Borland's Sprint had a very good emulation of the WordPerfect UI, as it also did of WordStar, MS Word, and others. Sadly for Borland, its amazing emulate-any-other-UI feature came out just around the same time that CUA came along and forced all the DOS apps to harmonize their UIs onto a common standard. The other killer feature of Sprint was the continuous background saving -- also foxed by DOS getting disk-caching as standard right around the same time. Saying that, it remains an important app. AIUI underneath, Sprint was based on an EMACS clone. Mark of the Unicorn -- still trading, remarkably -- wrote MINCE (MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs) and the separate SCRIBBLE text formatter. MINCE + Scribble evolved into PerfectWriter. That did quite well in its day; I tried it on a BBC Micro with a Torch Z80 2nd processor. PerfectWriter evolved into FinalWord, again quite a success in its day. I've read several books written entirely in FinalWord. Borland bought FinalWord 2 and renamed it Sprint. ISTM that if the text-formatting part were outsourced to Pandoc or something, or some monstrous Electron thing, the UI and continuous-save parts of Sprint could be re-implemented in GNU Emacs if someone had the will to do it. ErgoEmacs is a good start on the UI front: forget emulating WordPerfect etc. today. (Maybe provide WordStar keystrokes for the grumpy old gits.) Just put a _good_ CUA UI on Emacs, and give it the ability to handle basic, Markdown-style formatting, and a continuous save and live wordcount feature, and I suspect a lot of people would be interested. But that isn't what the Emacs folks want.

laurensr 4y ago

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. Does anyone recognize the software I'm describing? I've been searching for this out of nostalgia.

AlanYx 4y ago
WordPerfect 6 did have a graphical mode with a white background that looked a lot like MS Word, even when running on DOS. I can't remember, but it might even have been the default if you had a VGA card. CTRL-F3 would flip you back to the old blue background character mode interface.
taviso 4y ago
WordPerfect 6 did have an optional graphical mode that wrote directly to the framebuffer, I've never used it though! Is it possible you're thinking of that? There is a screenshot of it on this page: https://thewanderingnerd.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/corel-wordperfect-6-2-for-dos-a-look-back/ https://thewanderingnerd.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/corel-word...

ballenf 4y ago

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. 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. What makes it worse is that there's always some hidden setting or configuration somewhere to blame, so you never really can blame Word.

EEMac 4y ago
> What makes it worse is that there's always some hidden setting or configuration somewhere to blame, so you never really can blame Word. Yes you can.
petilon 4y ago
> so you never really can blame Word Absolutely, you can. Microsoft has long stopped improving the basic word processing features. When there is no competition Microsoft stops improving their products.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  When there is no competition Microsoft stops improving their products. Coincidentally, at this very moment I am re-creating an old paper form for another department in the company. They need it as a PDF. The people from the department sent me their best effort as a Word document. It's a disaster of mismatched styles, misaligned boxes, things that get cut off for no discernible reason, and stuff that won't print right because it's past Word's margins. I'm almost done re-creating it in Pages, from which I'll output a PDF. It's gone swimmingly. Pages isn't yet a replacement for every single little thing that Word does, but for the things it does do, it works well, quickly, predictably, and fast. But that may be Word's downfall: It took the kitchen sink route and became a mess. Pages is a good basic word processor for those who are interested in processing words. It's less "powerful" at doing all the thousand other things that people use Word for that they should probably do in Acrobat.

shrubble 4y ago

The notcurses project, notcurses.com has some pretty wild demos of what can be done with sixel etc.

frognumber 4y ago

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. Any clue where I might find a copy?

haunter 4y ago
Corel Linux 1.2 which had WP 8.1 included https://archive.org/details/corel_linux_1.2 https://archive.org/details/corel_linux_1.2 Then you can install it easily on modern distros either by script or manually http://www.xwp8users.com/wp81script.htm http://www.xwp8users.com/wp81script.htm http://www.xwp8users.com/wp81else.htm http://www.xwp8users.com/wp81else.htm
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

watersb 4y ago

"Hit F10 to Save Changes" 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. I was the Macintosh Guy, and never developed a muscle memory for the WordPerfect key bindings. Thank you, WordPerfect, for giving me bizarre keyboard commands for my BIOS settings.

retrocryptid 4y ago

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. https://youtu.be/0LTfGgqboE8 https://youtu.be/0LTfGgqboE8

csdvrx 4y ago
That's also my main usecase: doing plots with gnuplot A few years ago, it wasn't compiled by default in the debian packages so I released binaries: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-gnuplot https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-gnuplot
- dingosity 4y ago
  sweet!
- anthk 4y ago
  Maxima and Gnuplot are the ultimate lightweight math CAS+plotter combo for legacy devices such as Atom netbooks. No need for a monster like Sagemath.

abotsis 4y ago

I'll be damned - printing to postscript even works!

WillAdams 4y ago

The NeXTstep version was quite nice, especially for having been ported in some six weeks, or so the story goes.

ggm 4y ago

Three things from WP stuck in the mind 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 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. 3) it was fast enough. for a small memory model. We're talking pre MMU chips here. Dos.

paultopia 4y ago

so... like... how hard would it be to take the author's patches and make them mac-compatible...? (assuming an intel chip)

lproven 4y ago
You could do that. Another option: run a Linux VM and run it in that. But it will be considerably easier to run the DOS version of WordPerfect on macOS. This WPDOS page describes 4 different ways to run WordPerfect on macOS: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/sitemap.html http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/sitemap.html 1. Use the vDos emulator to run WordPerfect for DOS. 2. Use the DOSBox-X emulator to run WordPerfect for DOS. 3. Run the freeware WordPerfect for classic macOS under SheepShaver or QEMU 4. Run the Windows version of WordPerfect via WINE. To which, from another comment in this thread, I would add: 5. Run an Apple ][ or ][GS emulator and run the freeware WP for Apple ][.

jonathanoliver 4y ago

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. 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.