My first computer [1] didn't have Microsoft Word on it, but it had WordPerfect installed with the OEM Windows. I've always had really horrid handwriting so I preferred to type out all my homework since I was twelve or so, so I had to use whatever I could to do so, and WordPerfect was there.
I grew to actually really like it, and I used it for about two years until my hard drive crashed, I had to reinstall Windows, and then I installed StarOffice (which Google was giving away for free from Google Pack or something like that).
Still, I liked WordPerfect, and looking at the history it seems like it was actually quite significant; a part of me feels like it should have been the de facto word processor instead of Word.
[1] Not counting the hand me down Commodore 64 I got as a pretty young kid.
I somehow memorized most of the function key combos for wordperfect when in high school. And it wasn't like I was doing loads of reports for school. I guess it was a combination of there not being much else to do with the PC I had than playing the few (copied) games I had and fiddling with my copy of Wordperfect 5.1 (my neighbor who taught using it, supplied it). In any case, bored as I was, I explored a lot of the feature set and wrapped my head around features I would never use. Like creating mailings. I don't think I've ever actually had to create one. But it was there so I dove into it. For the post-internet generation, this is how you would create snail mail spam campaign in the early nineties. Merge a list of addressees with a letter with the right codes and then print personalized letters.
I also had a hand me down commodore 64 before that. My uncle donated this when he got his first PC. I taught myself basic on that. And with a few peeks and pokes managed a simple game even. Alas, I had no disk drive and never thought to actually save my creations anywhere. Like on the tape drive I did have. The commodore 64 was great though. And my uncle bundled some introductory computer science stuff with it (a primer on bits and bytes) that along with the excellent C64 manual went a long way to got me into programming. My local library was useless. I had no access to information. There was no internet (at least not accessible to me; I had not even heard of it). But that C64 manual got me curious and I had nothing better to do. I did not realize it at the time but that bit of commodore 64 documentation and computer science intro is what changed my life.
The PC I got after that was relatively boring because it did not include anything useful in terms of documentation. Starved of information, I dove into Wordperfect.
Sorry to be very selfish. but reading your story gave me a sad flashback. I also had a similar problem writing. And I also learnt typing and LaTeX by the time I was 11. However, teachers refused to accept "computer-generated" homework saying you don't learn without writing by hand. And I was condemned to a stressful childhood.
The things that were possible in 1980, when you could work mornings in a grocery store making FOUR dollars an hour, covering your house payment (with a large garden!) because your drapery business is failing.
I knew an old guy who worked at Wordperfect, he absolutely hated Pete Peterson with passion. From what he told me, Pete would be exactly the kind of guy that would insist on an Return to Office police just because if you are not suffering, you're not giving us back all we pay you.
"He also eliminated the different typing modes which plagued the early word processors. With other products, if you were typing new text at the end of a document, you had to be in a Create mode. If you typed in the middle, you had to be in an Edit mode. In an Edit mode, your typing would erase existing text, so to insert text, you had to change to an Insert mode. Alan allowed the user to type
anywhere in the document without a mode change"
This one and Sid Meier's "Memoir!" are two of my favourite software dev stories. Both are quick easy reads / and from the same era... code-nostalgia and hard- business mixed together.
How else would I have shrunk 12 pages of high-school physics notes to fit on the allowed 3x5" (76x127mm) index card with 0.1 pt font printed in raster mode at 600 dpi on an HP LaserJet 4? WP 5.2 for DOS. IIRC, Word for Windows at the time was inflexible in granularity of TrueType font sizes.
Late 80's: WP's 'Reveal Codes' helped me whip up some code that imported our application's screen definitions so I could use them directly in a specification document, impressing our customer. WP was an elegant weapon in a more civilized age.
Sometime in '85, my mom is an administrative assistant at the local University.
She's an absolute wiz on her office's newly modernized setup with these "PC" things running Wordperfect all creating beautiful documents on nascent HP laser printers. She'd let me show up after hours to hunt'n'peck the final draft of my high school term papers on the setup. I knew so little about computers then, but i firmly believe the magic of this simple process and things like "reveal codes" planted the seeds for finding deeper insights into speedy software on slow hardware and how file formats work. She was so sad when it inevitably went to windows :-) Rest in peace Bruce, thank you for .. you.
The comments here focus on WordPerfect, reveal codes, etc, as is natural for a tech site.
But what struck me reading this obituary is that he was a graduate of Brigham Young University, lived in Utah, and was a strong LGTBQ+ advocate, appearing to be a member of that community himself. I can't imagine that was easy, especially in the past (googling shows it is still condemned by the LDS church today) and he seems to have tackled it through very strong philanthropy and support.
Kudos. Kindness and support for those who need it is a greater legacy than any technology.
Bruce came into the world and made it a better place. Bruce was smart, kind, thoughtful, and generous. I have never met him personally, but early in my life, his story had a significant positive impact on my life. Like him, I too grew up in Twin Falls, Idaho. It’s a conservative state in an LDS Religious stronghold. My high school technology teacher (Mike) was married to his sister at the time and spoke fondly of him but more importantly, spoke specifically about who Bruce was. In hindsight, he knew I needed to hear it.
I wasn’t out as gay yet, maybe only 15 years old. Of course, it would have been a death sentence for a teenager in Southern Idaho to come out as gay. One day though, Mike told me “You know, you can grow up here and you can be /different/ in many different kinds of ways, you can be a band nerd, a guy who writes software, you can be gay, you can be /yourself/ and no matter what some adults might tell you right now, you will be okay. Not only okay, but you can live a fulfilled and successful life while being authentic and true to yourself. You are never the person that these adults claim you are. They don’t know anything.“ He then went on to tell me Bruce’s story and how in his opinion, of course, Bruce wasn’t “evil” or “wrong” for being gay.
In 2005, I wrote my technology teacher a personal thank you letter. I wrote one to Bruce as well and I asked if it could be shared with him.
Bruce took the time to respond:
Dear Brian,
Thank you for taking the time to write your letter. I was very moved by your story. There were parts that really reminded me of some of my own experiences in life.
The beautiful thing about life, at least as I have seen it, is that if you keep trying and never doubt yourself, you really can make amazing things happen both in yourself and in the world around you. I am sure you too have already touched many people around you and have been a positive influence for them. That's so very important. You may never realize the good you are doing, but it is happening.
Being gay is becoming more and more accepted as "normal" and one day maybe it just won't matter. As for being a geek, I don't consider that a bad term. The world needs geeks. But then they need gays too!
Thanks again,
Bruce Bastian
Imagine that all web editors emitted a proprietary document format that wasn't documented anywhere except in the editor that wrote a file and the viewer that interpreted it. You lived with this because that's just the way it was done. It was common to get a web page into such a state that 2/3 of the page was red, one column was RTL for some reason, and everything was in italics except for the 1 word you wanted to be that way.
You were used to this. It wasn't great, but that's life.
And then someone released a web editor with a "reveal HTML" setting that suddenly showed you that `<font color="red">` tag that messed everything up and allowed you to delete it.
That's what Reveal Codes did for us. It was a revelation.
WordPerfect is still being sold. Lawyers used to love it, but I think they’ve mostly moved on to Word now. So who’s still buying new licenses for WP in 2024?
I'm having flashbacks to the late 90s for some reason, WordPerfect was briefly popular on Linux, before StarOffice, OpenOffice, etc., when Corel Linux shipped with it.
I don't remember why I did this, but some time in the last decade I found one of those old binaries and ran it. It was annoying to get a libc5 binary to run on a recent distro. But it worked.
They haven't released a new version since 2021 so I am guessing hardly anyone is still buying WordPerfect. I'm guessing that like Winzip (which they also own) it is just going on fumes now while the company that owns it is focusing on other products.
The goto office package during MSDOS time period - First WordStar then Multimate and then WordPerfect.
Famous for supporting every printer manufactured on planet Earth - 3 disks of printer drivers.
Afaik it was written in assembler hence the tough time when they needed to move to more modern OS/2 with Presentation Manager and then later Windows 3.
WordPerfect really was an outstanding word processor. Reveal codes (like many others here have pointed out) made "debuging" formatting issues relatively painless as was the "make it fit to a certain layout or size" feature. In an era when you didn't really have WYSIWYG they did an excellent job of enabling users to more or less get nice looking output without having to go to TeX.
I remember it took a LONG time before there was a Windows version of WordPerfect which I think took a lot of their momentum away. Combine that with Microsoft basically giving away Office or bundling Word+Excel they succeeded in eroding market share from Lotus / WordPerfect.
I think the Lotus Suite may have even pre-dated MSFT Office as a suite (not 100% certain) and as usual functionality was often superior or better implemented than MSFT's.
Credit should also go to WordPerfect for making a Linux version in the 2000's before Linux desktop was as mature as it is today. Sadly they didn't continue this effort.
I'm glad we have LibreOffice but it's frankly a clone of MSFT Office, the UI is very cluttered and it has the same "weirdisms" that Office has.
The thing that got me was I used to use the second to last version of WordStar. Which had paragraph and page styles that you could import, edit and apply to text. When it became apparent that I couldn't be using Word Star to share documents anymore I tried WordPerfect and it was so annoying. You just want to set the paragraph style and start typing not play with tags. Eventually I just used Word. But styles in word wasn't nearly as obvious and straight foreword.
Back in the late 80's I was feeling the kind of the world editing documents WYSIWYG with some Desktop Publishing package on my Atari ST, while my friends toiled away in the stone age of PC text mode with WordPerfect and that incredibly weird and primitive thing (to me): reveal codes.
By the time I moved to PCs I could use Windows 3.x and MS Word, so I lived through college in the late 80s and early 90s without ever using WP. But I still learned to understand the meaning, reason and power of reveal codes.
On a podcast series covering some of the history of the intersection of business and technology in Utah (The 4th Node), the hosts had an episode with Bruce Bastian. Covers his background and the history of WordPerfect, for those curious to learn more and/or hear from Bruce himself:
My understanding was that a lot of courtroom document standards originated as "...like WordPerfect does it." For example, before word processing, no one expected documents to include word counts. When word processing came along, judges wanted to know much much they were going to be expected to read, so they started requiring the cover sheet to include the number of words. And because WP came along at the right time, its algorithm for counting words (do you include footnotes? Headers/footers? The word "page" on "page 23"? Section titles?) became the de facto way to do it, and judges being judges, some were persnickety about the numbers matching exactly and would throw a hissy if they didn't.
I lived in Provo for 17 years and the legacy of WordPerfect was still in the air - not to mention the development and gardens at Thanksgiving Point which was an Ashton project, IIUC.
Anyway, I wasn't aware of Bruce Bastian specifically but the Mormon/LGBT angle stands out. It must have taken a lot of character to be out so publicly in that community.
(The LDS church's response to legalization of gay marriage was to excommunicate anyone who got married to someone of the same sex, and to bar their children from baptism and advancement unless they disavowed their parents' relationship. The policy was rescinded in 2019. In earlier times one could get excommunicated simply for _being_ gay.)
I met one of the Lotus cofounders on a group bicycling vacation tour in Europe. While legally blind at the time, he had a strategy for participating without crashing into anyone else.
WordPerfect was my perfect electric typewriter experience. It struck a nerve for me.
I had an old, bulky laptop, Windows 3.11, and then WordPerfect 6. Of course, everything had to be installed from disk.
This was my technically totally limited writing setup, however I was very productive with it and enjoyed the setup.
Even on Windows 95, WordPerfect was my tool of choice. MS Word overtook only because WP crashed too often and the beneficial Grammar tool was lagging behind.
I felt sad the moment I had to let go of WP. Even thinking about it today feels crazy. I never ever again felt an emotional rift after switching to another tool. It was only this one time with WP.
I think Corel bought WP and somewhat tried to revive WP, but this came too late.
WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS paired with a model F XT or AT layout (function keys on the side) keyboard has a special place in my heart. That combination along with a copious amount of weed got me through a lot of college papers in the late 80s.
[+] [-] tombert|1 year ago|reply
My first computer [1] didn't have Microsoft Word on it, but it had WordPerfect installed with the OEM Windows. I've always had really horrid handwriting so I preferred to type out all my homework since I was twelve or so, so I had to use whatever I could to do so, and WordPerfect was there.
I grew to actually really like it, and I used it for about two years until my hard drive crashed, I had to reinstall Windows, and then I installed StarOffice (which Google was giving away for free from Google Pack or something like that).
Still, I liked WordPerfect, and looking at the history it seems like it was actually quite significant; a part of me feels like it should have been the de facto word processor instead of Word.
[1] Not counting the hand me down Commodore 64 I got as a pretty young kid.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|1 year ago|reply
I also had a hand me down commodore 64 before that. My uncle donated this when he got his first PC. I taught myself basic on that. And with a few peeks and pokes managed a simple game even. Alas, I had no disk drive and never thought to actually save my creations anywhere. Like on the tape drive I did have. The commodore 64 was great though. And my uncle bundled some introductory computer science stuff with it (a primer on bits and bytes) that along with the excellent C64 manual went a long way to got me into programming. My local library was useless. I had no access to information. There was no internet (at least not accessible to me; I had not even heard of it). But that C64 manual got me curious and I had nothing better to do. I did not realize it at the time but that bit of commodore 64 documentation and computer science intro is what changed my life.
The PC I got after that was relatively boring because it did not include anything useful in terms of documentation. Starved of information, I dove into Wordperfect.
[+] [-] myworkinisgood|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tgma|1 year ago|reply
http://www.wordplace.com/ap/almostperfect.pdf
[+] [-] Scoundreller|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] elzbardico|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|1 year ago|reply
"He also eliminated the different typing modes which plagued the early word processors. With other products, if you were typing new text at the end of a document, you had to be in a Create mode. If you typed in the middle, you had to be in an Edit mode. In an Edit mode, your typing would erase existing text, so to insert text, you had to change to an Insert mode. Alan allowed the user to type anywhere in the document without a mode change"
[+] [-] songeater|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eigenvalue|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] banish-m4|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lallysingh|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmorris|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] russtrotter|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vintagedave|1 year ago|reply
But what struck me reading this obituary is that he was a graduate of Brigham Young University, lived in Utah, and was a strong LGTBQ+ advocate, appearing to be a member of that community himself. I can't imagine that was easy, especially in the past (googling shows it is still condemned by the LDS church today) and he seems to have tackled it through very strong philanthropy and support.
Kudos. Kindness and support for those who need it is a greater legacy than any technology.
[+] [-] jetsnoc|1 year ago|reply
I wasn’t out as gay yet, maybe only 15 years old. Of course, it would have been a death sentence for a teenager in Southern Idaho to come out as gay. One day though, Mike told me “You know, you can grow up here and you can be /different/ in many different kinds of ways, you can be a band nerd, a guy who writes software, you can be gay, you can be /yourself/ and no matter what some adults might tell you right now, you will be okay. Not only okay, but you can live a fulfilled and successful life while being authentic and true to yourself. You are never the person that these adults claim you are. They don’t know anything.“ He then went on to tell me Bruce’s story and how in his opinion, of course, Bruce wasn’t “evil” or “wrong” for being gay.
In 2005, I wrote my technology teacher a personal thank you letter. I wrote one to Bruce as well and I asked if it could be shared with him.
Bruce took the time to respond:
[+] [-] ssl-3|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kstrauser|1 year ago|reply
Imagine that all web editors emitted a proprietary document format that wasn't documented anywhere except in the editor that wrote a file and the viewer that interpreted it. You lived with this because that's just the way it was done. It was common to get a web page into such a state that 2/3 of the page was red, one column was RTL for some reason, and everything was in italics except for the 1 word you wanted to be that way.
You were used to this. It wasn't great, but that's life.
And then someone released a web editor with a "reveal HTML" setting that suddenly showed you that `<font color="red">` tag that messed everything up and allowed you to delete it.
That's what Reveal Codes did for us. It was a revelation.
[+] [-] MegaDeKay|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zzo38computer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|1 year ago|reply
Related (from Wikipedia references):
https://www.deseret.com/utah/2024/06/17/word-perfect-co-foun...
https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/bruce-bastian-co-fo...
https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-mou...
[+] [-] canucker2016|1 year ago|reply
https://www.legacy.com/news/celebrity-deaths/bruce-bastian-1...
[+] [-] criddell|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|1 year ago|reply
I still use WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24413394
[+] [-] asveikau|1 year ago|reply
I don't remember why I did this, but some time in the last decade I found one of those old binaries and ran it. It was annoying to get a libc5 binary to run on a recent distro. But it worked.
[+] [-] jccalhoun|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hnlmorg|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tibbydudeza|1 year ago|reply
Famous for supporting every printer manufactured on planet Earth - 3 disks of printer drivers.
Afaik it was written in assembler hence the tough time when they needed to move to more modern OS/2 with Presentation Manager and then later Windows 3.
[+] [-] banish-m4|1 year ago|reply
Also, when they supported video cards for print preview, similarly they had extensive support.
[+] [-] vrinsd|1 year ago|reply
I remember it took a LONG time before there was a Windows version of WordPerfect which I think took a lot of their momentum away. Combine that with Microsoft basically giving away Office or bundling Word+Excel they succeeded in eroding market share from Lotus / WordPerfect.
I think the Lotus Suite may have even pre-dated MSFT Office as a suite (not 100% certain) and as usual functionality was often superior or better implemented than MSFT's.
Credit should also go to WordPerfect for making a Linux version in the 2000's before Linux desktop was as mature as it is today. Sadly they didn't continue this effort.
I'm glad we have LibreOffice but it's frankly a clone of MSFT Office, the UI is very cluttered and it has the same "weirdisms" that Office has.
[+] [-] Gibbon1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] canucker2016|1 year ago|reply
Microsoft Office for Mac arrived in 1989, the Windows version came in 1990. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_office
[+] [-] annoyingnoob|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Jare|1 year ago|reply
By the time I moved to PCs I could use Windows 3.x and MS Word, so I lived through college in the late 80s and early 90s without ever using WP. But I still learned to understand the meaning, reason and power of reveal codes.
[+] [-] TheAmazingRace|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] seanlane|1 year ago|reply
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1z0AEyFvPN30WFbQc317T6
[+] [-] pjfin123|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kstrauser|1 year ago|reply
Here's an example of someone bumping against that: https://www.wpuniverse.com/vb/forum/wordperfect/troubleshoot...
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CoastalCoder|1 year ago|reply
Sorry, man.
---
But does that mean you have some good lawyer jokes to share?
[+] [-] pc2g4d|1 year ago|reply
Anyway, I wasn't aware of Bruce Bastian specifically but the Mormon/LGBT angle stands out. It must have taken a lot of character to be out so publicly in that community.
(The LDS church's response to legalization of gay marriage was to excommunicate anyone who got married to someone of the same sex, and to bar their children from baptism and advancement unless they disavowed their parents' relationship. The policy was rescinded in 2019. In earlier times one could get excommunicated simply for _being_ gay.)
It looks like Bruce and his husband made some appearances on Mormon Stories podcast if you want some inside baseball: https://www.mormonstories.org/?s=bruce+bastian
[+] [-] hbarka|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] banish-m4|1 year ago|reply
I met one of the Lotus cofounders on a group bicycling vacation tour in Europe. While legally blind at the time, he had a strategy for participating without crashing into anyone else.
[+] [-] _the_inflator|1 year ago|reply
I had an old, bulky laptop, Windows 3.11, and then WordPerfect 6. Of course, everything had to be installed from disk.
This was my technically totally limited writing setup, however I was very productive with it and enjoyed the setup.
Even on Windows 95, WordPerfect was my tool of choice. MS Word overtook only because WP crashed too often and the beneficial Grammar tool was lagging behind.
I felt sad the moment I had to let go of WP. Even thinking about it today feels crazy. I never ever again felt an emotional rift after switching to another tool. It was only this one time with WP.
I think Corel bought WP and somewhat tried to revive WP, but this came too late.
[+] [-] tssva|1 year ago|reply