[CentOS] Word Perfect [Was: Novell sale news?]

Tue Nov 23 17:49:27 UTC 2010
Bill Campbell <centos at celestial.com>

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
>On Mon, 2010-11-22 at 22:09 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote: 
>> On 11/22/10 9:57 PM, John R. Dennison wrote:
>> > On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 09:29:12PM -0500, Michael Semcheski wrote:
>> >> Windows only, unfortunately.
>> > 	When did they stop publishing *nix versions?  I worked
>> > 	extensively with that monstrosity 15-16 years ago on
>> > 	SCO / MWC Coherent.
>> I don't think they ever did a real native *nix verson - they had a slightly 
>> custom version of wine wrapped around the windows code.   And there was some 
>> strange Microsoft involvement in the Corel company too - probably why you 
>> haven't heard much from them.
>
>I'm pretty sure they did have such a version;  WP was the first 'real'
>word processor available for LINUX.  I ran it on a LINUX host and a
>dozen or so NCD X-terminals.  It worked, but I can't imagine anyone
>having been a fan. It was slow, clunky, and just ugly.

WordPerfect was available for SCO Xenix decades ago.  I wrote a
conversion program to convert Radio Shack Scripsit files to WP
4.3 which was pretty much the Lingua Franca of WP files in the
late 1980s and early '90s (amazingly I sold a copy of this within
the last 6 months to a police department that had been using
Scripsit continuously).

>And as for reveal codes... OOo has a mode that displays non-printable
>characters. Beyond that I just don't see the point.  OOo's document
>collaboration and versioning tools are far and away better than what I
>recall from WP.

WP users *LOVED* reveal codes as it allows people to see exactly
what's going on under the hood, and even fix some things when the
files get out of whack.  I answered the phone one time, and the
opening from the caller was ``I want Reveal Codes''.

I have never used word processing programs for much of anything
serious, using vim and groff or docbook xml for most things.
Back when I was managing Radio Shack Computer Centers, I got
pretty good with Scripsit, mostly so I could sell and answer
people's questions (and was a whiz with VisiCalc and MultiPlan :-).

Bill
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