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Word Perfect!!! I'm almost positive that was the editor they taught me in the early 1990s in grammar school! (We called it grammar school back then, for it was
by 90s_dev 1y ago
Word Perfect!!! I'm almost positive that was the editor they taught me in the early 1990s in grammar school! (We called it grammar school back then, for it was the 1800s.) And yet I had never seen or used it since. This brings back so many memories. I was sitting next to a girl named Dana, the only Dana I ever met.
- teddyh 1y agoMaybe her parents liked Ghostbusters?
- jonhohle 1y agoWhile it’s hard to imagine someone using Word Perfect in grammar school born during or after 1984, I hold out hope that her middle initial was “Z”. That said, I believe I learned spreadsheets in high school using Lotus for DOS in 1996, but can’t imagine kids 3 years later still doing the same.
- xp84 1y agoI'm around that age. In poorer areas we just had whatever cast-off computers. Circa 1995, my grammar school featured: - A Franklin ACE (Apple ][ Clone) with an amber screen and two floppy drives - An Atari ST with a daisywheel printer (Letter quality!) The newest additions to the school were: - A Compaq 386 with an amber screen - this is where we had WordPerfect - A Tandy 1000, 8086 with DOS and a color monitor. Not sure if it could do VGA, definitely CGA was a thing. We ran Where in The World Is Carmen Sandiego and a paint program on that. Because it was in my classroom, this was really the first computer I learned exhaustively. I read its MS-DOS manual cover to cover and enjoyed writing batch files, building launcher menus, etc.
- onionisafruit 1y agoIt was huge back then, but it tanked in the transition to Windows. I kept using the DOS version for years after that because I had muscle memory for WordPerfect’s shortcuts and liked the reveal codes feature. Also I’ve met two Danas that I can remember. Both were lovely people.
- MBCook 1y agoYep. It was THE program. A bit like how Office was THE program in the late 90s and in the 2000s before Google Docs really started taking off. The kind of thing people bought computers for. You didn’t need a computer. You needed Word Perfect. I still remember the little card you could put above the function keys on your keyboard that showed you what alt-F7 or ctrl-F9 did. Each modifier was a different color. First program I remember seeing people really use on a computer when I was a kid.
- 90s_dev 1y agoThe only keyboard thing similar to that I ever used was the full keyboard cover that came with the Flintstones PC game.
- MBCook 1y agoThis is either it or very very close: http://xahlee.info/kbd/wordperfect_shortcuts_strip.html http://xahlee.info/kbd/wordperfect_shortcuts_strip.html And for context, this link has a picture of it on top of a keyboard (cropped): https://luciamonterorodriguez.com/atajos-de-teclado-y-raton-en-word/ https://luciamonterorodriguez.com/atajos-de-teclado-y-raton-...
- sillywalk 1y agoI remember Janes AH-64 Longbow also had a keyboard cover. https://archive.org/details/janes-ah-64-d-longbow-95/keyboard1.jpeg https://archive.org/details/janes-ah-64-d-longbow-95/keyboar...
- bitwize 1y agoLotus 1-2-3 was THE program for PCs in the DOS era. WordPerfect was a close second, followed by dBase and then maybe Flight Simulator. When magazines reported, or OEMs advertised, that a particular computer had "100% IBM compatibility", generally there wasn't like a formal benchmark for this. It basically meant that the PC versions of Lotus and Flight Simulator ran fine on the machine.
- Sharlin 1y agoWhen I first read the Hitchhiker’s Guide, I thought “Ford Prefect” was a pun on “Word Perfect”, not knowing anything about the car model at the time.
- PTOB 1y agoMan, I had to use Word Perfect in school in 1997. It seemed dumb at the time, but I learned some valuable lessons about markup and the importance of seeing hidden control characters to troubleshoot formatting issues.