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Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died

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Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died

#41

Post by CoastalCoder »

pjfin123 wrote: post #38

I know lawyers (who do a lot of very particular word processing) who kept using WordPerfect for decades after Microsoft Word had become the norm.

> I know lawyers

Sorry, man.

---

But does that mean you have some good lawyer jokes to share?

Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died

#42

Post by Phiwise_ »

Scoundreller wrote: post #27
tgma wrote: post #2

The WordPerfect story as told by an early executive, Pete Peterson: http://www.wordplace.com/ap/almostperfect.pdf

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.

Partially because where WP set up shop, the Utah Valley in the 1980s, was mostly still a rural county with a barely-semi-urban exclave at the middle. Living in the center of Provo let you pretend to be surrounded by actual development while you worked or got your Psych degree, but WordPerfect was building itself on top of apple orchards and alfalfa fields once they went a few miles outside in any direction. The land was much, much cheaper, and the old steelworkers' not-even-ramblers much smaller, than even the neighboring Salt Lake Valley a few tens of miles to the north, which by now had a mostly-developed mix despite being more than a little larger, let alone any of the actually urban metro areas high tech businesses usually tend to spring up in.

Nowadays, though, the place is pretty much built out, and the land prices have spiked accordingly since most of the nearby areas are BLM land. Don't expect a next WordPerfect any time soon.

Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died

#43

Post by TeMPOraL »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #34
tgma wrote: post #2

The 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…

If it worked at s-expression level rather than character level, it would make total sense! Editing and inserting are different phases.

And of course it's trendy writers' advice today to do not mix writing with editing. Create vs. Edit mode embodied that before it was popular.

Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died

#45

Post by dctoedt »

In the 1990s I loved the macro feature of WP 5.1. Macros and Reveal Codes let me write a basic Emacs keyboard emulator to accommodate my fingers' muscle memory.

When Windows got to be a thing, my law firm considered switching to WP for Windows because WP 5.1 for DOS was the unquestioned industry standard for lawyers. But we surveyed our clients (almost all of them were big companies) and learned that they were going over to Word for Windows. So we said, "who gives a [hoot] what other law firms are using" and switched to Word for Windows. It was more than a bit of a downgrade from WP 5.1 in DOS

Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died

#46

Post by kstrauser »

ssl-3 wrote: post #8

So long, and thanks for Reveal Codes .

For those who weren't there at the time:

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 `` tag that messed everything up and allowed you to delete it.

That's what Reveal Codes did for us. It was a revelation.

Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died

#48

Post by kstrauser »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #41
pjfin123 wrote: post #38

I know lawyers (who do a lot of very particular word processing) who kept using WordPerfect for decades after Microsoft Word had become the norm.

> I know lawyers Sorry, man. --- But does that mean you have some good lawyer jokes to share?

Why don't sharks bite lawyers?

Professional courtesy.

(I have a million of these from my lawyer friends.)

Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died

#50

Post by kstrauser »

pjfin123 wrote: post #38

I know lawyers (who do a lot of very particular word processing) who kept using WordPerfect for decades after Microsoft Word had become the norm.

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.

Here's an example of someone bumping against that: https://www.wpuniverse.com/vb/forum/wordperfect/troubleshoot...

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