5 ms·

I'm old enough to actually have been a user of both WordPerfect and Word in the early days, so I saw the rise and fall of WordPerfect, along with the rise of Wo

by steven2012 12y ago

I'm old enough to actually have been a user of both WordPerfect and Word in the early days, so I saw the rise and fall of WordPerfect, along with the rise of Word and MS Office, through the eyes of a user. Basically, Wordperfect was the best word processor out there during the late 80s to early 90s. Keep in mind that at the time, most people did not do their own word processing. WordPerfect 5.2 I remember as being the very best word processor out there. However, Microsoft came out with MS Word for DOS, and I remember distinctly using Word 2.0. At the time, there were a lot of issues where sometimes when you typed on Word, you would get snow on the screen, but it was pretty fast compared to WordPerfect. The rumor was that Microsoft was using special APIs that WordPerfect (and any of their other competitors) didn't have access to that allowed them to have faster performance and smaller latency when dealing with larger documents, etc. But WordPerfect was clearly the superior program. The key was that WordPerfect didn't adapt well to Windows. When Windows 3.1 came out the version of Word for Windows was excellent, vs the version of WordPerfect. WordPerfect was really clunky from what I remember, and as Windows took off, they never really got any traction and as more version of Windows and Word came around, the difference between Word and WordPerfect grew cavernous. By 1995, if I remember, no one even considered WordPerfect as viable compared to Word. Then the whole Corel/WP debacle occurred which cemented the death of both of those companies.

bprieto 12y ago
This and also Windows made more important the office suit. Before Windows, integration between apps like WordPerfect, Lotus 123 or dBase wasn't so important, so you could buy each piece of software from a different vendor. Solid copy and paste between spreadsheet, word processor and presentation software was the killer feature of MS Office.
teh_klev 12y ago
I'm must be older than you I guess :) . I was heavily involved in typesetting work between 1986 and 1990 (offset litho printing [0]). One of the tools we used for authoring was WordStar (and PostScript - we wrote a pile PostScript using WordStar's very capable text only editor mode). WordStar beat the pants off of WordPerfect for technical layout and hackability when it came to printers and the like for rush documents. I used to mod WordStar to support printer escape sequences where there were none using a hex editor. That dated back to at least around 1985. I still miss WordStar, its keycords (^K^B to begin a block), context menus and loads of other things outshone WordPerfect for technical writing. I wrote thousands of lines of DBase II/III and C using WordStar's text mode. Hell, even Brief (circa 1988) implemented the same keycords as WordStar, it was really popular with DOS app programmers back then (e.g. the Clipper season based releases before Clipper 5 arrived). But then that was maybe the dev in me. WordStar was more versatile as a tool for both Word Processing and as a text editor. However WordPerfect was more loved by the non-technical writers and I can kinda see why, but I could never get my head around the function key sequences. * caveats here being that I wasn't introduced to vi until 1987, just as I left college, and didn't have affordable access to unix until I stole a copy of SCO Unix for x86 around 1992. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offset_lithography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offset_lithography
- steven2012 12y ago
  George Martin, author of the Game of Thrones series, STILL uses Wordstar on DOS to this day. :) http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/14/george_r_r_martin_writes_on_dos_based_wordstar_4_0_software_from_the_1980s.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/14/george_r_...
- colanderman 12y ago
  Borland's Turbo C (and presumably Turbo Pascal) used WordStar keybindings too. Nowadays I use JOE (Joe's Own Editor) which is a programmer's text editor with WordStar keybindings.
- e12e 12y ago
  Somewhat related, I remember typesetting some project/essays in junior high-school on some DTP software on the Amiga. I can't recall the name now, but I don't think it was PageStream that seems to be most popular google hit (and is apparently still available both for Amiga OS, Windows and Linux): http://www.pagestream.org/?id=1663 http://www.pagestream.org/?id=1663 Whatever software it was, the printer driver managed to output quite readable black text on our 9-pin dot-matrix printer (at an excruciatingly slow rate -- I remember pulling an all-nighter -- having finished a 10-20 page report on, I think nuclear weapons/the attacks on Japan -- at around 06:00 in the morning -- and the printout taking close to three hours making me late for school ...). What was great about that pice, was that it followed the pattern of most modern DTP packages, with content-boxes that allowed you to flow text through them. And let you write your actual text in a plain ("distraction free") editor. Much better than the "rich" word processors at the time. I still think Adobe's CSS region proposal[1] sounds pretty good -- not really as an addition to traditional CSS (a language suitable for styling, but unsuitable for layout) -- but as a way to augment CSS and HTML to become a language more-suited to layout (not good, not great, just not horribly bad). Lie[2], doesn't think so, but I think his perspective is inaccurate on this one. His points are valid, but I don't think he's really addressing the correct issue. CSS columns is a technical way to break up text. Allowing text to flow into boxes allows keeping the text plain and simple (think a classic html3 document with only text) and the layout separate (the divs/boxes). Lie appears to think in terms of a object/hypertext/rich document -- but that kind of thinking leads to single page apps where you can't read a blog article with js disabled. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-regions/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-regions/ [2] http://alistapart.com/blog/post/css-regions-considered-harmful http://alistapart.com/blog/post/css-regions-considered-harmf...

bprieto 12y ago

This and also Windows made more important the office suit. Before Windows, integration between apps like WordPerfect, Lotus 123 or dBase wasn't so important, so you could buy each piece of software from a different vendor. Solid copy and paste between spreadsheet, word processor and presentation software was the killer feature of MS Office.

teh_klev 12y ago

I'm must be older than you I guess :) . I was heavily involved in typesetting work between 1986 and 1990 (offset litho printing [0]). One of the tools we used for authoring was WordStar (and PostScript - we wrote a pile PostScript using WordStar's very capable text only editor mode). WordStar beat the pants off of WordPerfect for technical layout and hackability when it came to printers and the like for rush documents. I used to mod WordStar to support printer escape sequences where there were none using a hex editor. That dated back to at least around 1985. I still miss WordStar, its keycords (^K^B to begin a block), context menus and loads of other things outshone WordPerfect for technical writing. I wrote thousands of lines of DBase II/III and C using WordStar's text mode. Hell, even Brief (circa 1988) implemented the same keycords as WordStar, it was really popular with DOS app programmers back then (e.g. the Clipper season based releases before Clipper 5 arrived). But then that was maybe the dev in me. WordStar was more versatile as a tool for both Word Processing and as a text editor. However WordPerfect was more loved by the non-technical writers and I can kinda see why, but I could never get my head around the function key sequences. * caveats here being that I wasn't introduced to vi until 1987, just as I left college, and didn't have affordable access to unix until I stole a copy of SCO Unix for x86 around 1992. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offset_lithography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offset_lithography

steven2012 12y ago
George Martin, author of the Game of Thrones series, STILL uses Wordstar on DOS to this day. :) http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/14/george_r_r_martin_writes_on_dos_based_wordstar_4_0_software_from_the_1980s.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/14/george_r_...
colanderman 12y ago
Borland's Turbo C (and presumably Turbo Pascal) used WordStar keybindings too. Nowadays I use JOE (Joe's Own Editor) which is a programmer's text editor with WordStar keybindings.
e12e 12y ago
Somewhat related, I remember typesetting some project/essays in junior high-school on some DTP software on the Amiga. I can't recall the name now, but I don't think it was PageStream that seems to be most popular google hit (and is apparently still available both for Amiga OS, Windows and Linux): http://www.pagestream.org/?id=1663 http://www.pagestream.org/?id=1663 Whatever software it was, the printer driver managed to output quite readable black text on our 9-pin dot-matrix printer (at an excruciatingly slow rate -- I remember pulling an all-nighter -- having finished a 10-20 page report on, I think nuclear weapons/the attacks on Japan -- at around 06:00 in the morning -- and the printout taking close to three hours making me late for school ...). What was great about that pice, was that it followed the pattern of most modern DTP packages, with content-boxes that allowed you to flow text through them. And let you write your actual text in a plain ("distraction free") editor. Much better than the "rich" word processors at the time. I still think Adobe's CSS region proposal[1] sounds pretty good -- not really as an addition to traditional CSS (a language suitable for styling, but unsuitable for layout) -- but as a way to augment CSS and HTML to become a language more-suited to layout (not good, not great, just not horribly bad). Lie[2], doesn't think so, but I think his perspective is inaccurate on this one. His points are valid, but I don't think he's really addressing the correct issue. CSS columns is a technical way to break up text. Allowing text to flow into boxes allows keeping the text plain and simple (think a classic html3 document with only text) and the layout separate (the divs/boxes). Lie appears to think in terms of a object/hypertext/rich document -- but that kind of thinking leads to single page apps where you can't read a blog article with js disabled. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-regions/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-regions/ [2] http://alistapart.com/blog/post/css-regions-considered-harmful http://alistapart.com/blog/post/css-regions-considered-harmf...