Bill Campbell wrote:
> 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.
Yup. And Corel put out a distro - I *have* it, on a CD, from about 10
years ago. Unfortunately, shortly after that, a group led by M$ bought a
major chunk of Corel, and immeditely shut that all down. Deliberately. But
then, it's not "alleged", since the court cases are long decided, that M$
paid and leaned on hardware manufacturers to only provide Windows &
Office.
>
> 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
UGH! I wouldn't use WP before 5.0, and then it was really useable.
<snip>
>>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''.
Yup. A number of years ago, I wasted 20-25 min, because Dirt, er, Word
didn't think "right justify this paragraph" was a code to be revealed.
The other thing is, think about what the display looked like under reveal
codes on WP... and tell me it isn't almost 1:1 for HTML, maybe with a few
codes labeled differently. Hmmmm, something that just hit me as I typed
that: no one used Word before the mid-nineties, everyone was using WP...
and I'll wager Sir Berners-Lee and others were using it also....
>
> I have never used word processing programs for much of anything
> serious, using vim and groff or docbook xml for most things.
I've done lots of documents, documentation, and even some published
articles in SysAdmin (before it sadly went under), and everyone wants word
processing docs; up through the end of the nineties, it was all WP, then
it shifted to *bleah* Word.
<snip>
mark