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:
Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
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Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#32This makes me sadder than I thought it would. 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…
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 f…
I probably would have done my homework on the C64 in the late 90's, where doing something like that on the C64 would still kind of be a viable thing (barely), but my dad didn't have the printer for it anymore. My parents had a computer and I did use it but mostly to play Descent.
Once I got my own computer I started doing everything on it, primarily because teachers genuinely could not read my handwriting. This sometimes required me to retype the worksheets in some capacity, but fortunately my teachers never had a problem with me doing that (maybe because they knew the alternative would be an unreadable mess). I learned algebra and calculus via the use of MathType (which Florida's online school gave a free license and I took one class virtually), and it's to a point now where I can almost never find a pen when I need one because I type everything out, since I haven't really practiced writing with by hand for about twenty years. I genuinely get kind of uncomfortable doing any kind of math with pen and paper now, since I'm so used to MathType and now LaTeX.
I never did a depth-first analysis of the features of WordPerfect, just the superficial stuff to make basic documents, but I did like using it. I don't remember any of the keystrokes anymore, but I did learn them when I was first using it.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#33WordPerfect 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…
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.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#34The WordPerfect story as told by an early executive, Pete Peterson: http://www.wordplace.com/ap/almostperfect.pdf
vi/vim users everywhere gonna love this one:
"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"
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#35I've never really seen Word as anything other than inferior, having cut my teeth on WordPerfect.
Others have posted their favorite shortcuts (and Reveal Codes truly was magical); my most used ones I haven't seen mentioned were Ctrl+Shift+F1 and Alt+Shift+F1. IIRC, those were spell check and thesaurus, respectively.
RIP Bruce, you made the world a better place for millions.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#36I changed the url from https://www.wsj.com/tech/bruce-bastian-wordperfect-lgbtq-act... because that one doesn't appear to have any paywall workaround. It does appear to be a better article though, so if someone finds a link that people can actually read, we can swap it back.
Black Bar?
(Emailed as well.)
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#37WordPerfect 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?
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.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#38I know lawyers (who do a lot of very particular word processing) who kept using WordPerfect for decades after Microsoft Word had become the norm.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#39The WordPerfect story as told by an early executive, Pete Peterson: http://www.wordplace.com/ap/almostperfect.pdf
vi/vim users everywhere gonna love this one: "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 allo…
I use neovim, but I actually really prefer the Wordstar-like editing model (same/similar to Word Perfect's?).
You'd think that would push me towards emacs, but I just get the sense that neovim has a more active community.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#40WordPerfect 5.x, running on DOS, is/was the best work processor ever. WordPerfect indeed.
that's my experience as well