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.
Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
61–70 of 87 posts
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#62Reveal codes was useful. The loss of screen realestate to the hint bar was sometimes annoying.
I preferred runoff/[t]roff and vi
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#63The 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.
They weren't possible. A quick Google says that median US home price in 1980 was $64k, and the average mortgage interest was 13.7%[1]. Plugging that into a loan calculator, assuming a 20% down payment and 30 year term, and I get a $600/month payment, almost the entirety of that worker's full time $4/hr salary.
Either the numbers here are spun or Orem was extraordinarily cheap.
[1] This was right in the middle of the inflation crisis!
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They weren't possible. A quick Google says that median US home price in 1980 was $64k, and the average mortgage interest was 13.7%[1]. Plugging that into a loan calculator, assuming a 20% down payment and 30 year term, and I get a $600/month payment, almost the entirety of that worker's full time $4/hr salary. Either the numbers here are spun or Orem was extraordinarily cheap. [1] This was right in the middle of the…
As other commenters have noted, "median US home price" is not a relevant measure here, where their location would have much-lower-than-median prices.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#65Sometime 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.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
They weren't possible. A quick Google says that median US home price in 1980 was $64k, and the average mortgage interest was 13.7%[1]. Plugging that into a loan calculator, assuming a 20% down payment and 30 year term, and I get a $600/month payment, almost the entirety of that worker's full time $4/hr salary. Either the numbers here are spun or Orem was extraordinarily cheap. [1] This was right in the middle of the…
As other commenters have noted, "median US home price" is not a relevant measure here, where their location would have much-lower-than-median prices.
> "median US home price" is not a relevant measure here
It certainly seems relevant to the discussion of "The things that were possible in 1980". Yes, it was possible to live more cheaply in the uninhabited exurbs of Utah in 1980. It's possible to do so in 2024 too!
Upthread commenter was clearly evoking the idea of the US economy for low wage workers having gotten "worse" in the last 40 years. Something that's (1) clearly not true in general given the data and (2) not even true in the specific situation evoked.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#67WordPerfect 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.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They weren't possible. A quick Google says that median US home price in 1980 was $64k, and the average mortgage interest was 13.7%[1]. Plugging that into a loan calculator, assuming a 20% down payment and 30 year term, and I get a $600/month payment, almost the entirety of that worker's full time $4/hr salary. Either the numbers here are spun or Orem was extraordinarily cheap. [1] This was right in the middle of the…
The author did admit that their salary almost covered their house payment, but didn't include any other expenses. And if they bought a few years ago before interest/inflation rates spiked, it's a more viable story.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#69RIP. Expertise in wordperfect was what allowed me to grok emacs and latex during college and post-grad work. In working life, I was forced to shift to vim, when I found emacs unavailable by default on many unix boxen.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#70WordPerfect 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…
Lotus Smartsuite came in 1992 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_SmartSuite .
Microsoft Office for Mac arrived in 1989, the Windows version came in 1990. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_office