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What were the MS-DOS programs that the moricons.dll icons were intended for?

(devblogs.microsoft.com)
280 points rbanffy | 5 comments | 13 May 25 11:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.897s | source
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90s_dev ◴[16 May 25 13:31 UTC] No.44005319[source]▶
Word Perfect!!! I'm almost positive that was the editor they taught me in the early 1990s in grammar school! (We called it grammar school back then, for it was the 1800s.) And yet I had never seen or used it since. This brings back so many memories. I was sitting next to a girl named Dana, the only Dana I ever met.
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onionisafruit ◴[16 May 25 14:20 UTC] No.44005851[source]▶
It was huge back then, but it tanked in the transition to Windows. I kept using the DOS version for years after that because I had muscle memory for WordPerfect’s shortcuts and liked the reveal codes feature.

Also I’ve met two Danas that I can remember. Both were lovely people.

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MBCook ◴[16 May 25 14:26 UTC] No.44005923[source]▶
Yep. It was THE program. A bit like how Office was THE program in the late 90s and in the 2000s before Google Docs really started taking off.

The kind of thing people bought computers for. You didn’t need a computer. You needed Word Perfect.

I still remember the little card you could put above the function keys on your keyboard that showed you what alt-F7 or ctrl-F9 did. Each modifier was a different color.

First program I remember seeing people really use on a computer when I was a kid.

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1. SoftTalker ◴[16 May 25 15:32 UTC] No.44006683[source]▶
As I understand it, WordPerfect held on in the legal professions after most others had switched to MS Office (Word). I guess there were a lot of good templates and many law firms had all their boilerplate documents in WP and didn't want to change.
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2. Shorel ◴[16 May 25 15:59 UTC] No.44007000[source]▶
Have you ever used LaTeX?

Word Perfect was like LaTeX and MS Word at the same time. You could edit text or you could edit the codes and there were no nasty surprises or any random reorganization of the document because you copy pasted something.

Also, by editing the codes you could dictate the precise way the document should look.

I think it was ahead of its time.

Sadly, WP 6.0 changed the macro language too much (they made everything an object and many features were lost) and it was not as successful as WP5.1, because you just don't make all the macros of your customers obsolete overnight.

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3. pbhjpbhj ◴[16 May 25 16:23 UTC] No.44007260[source]▶
The loss of `reveal codes` is still felt when Word does arbitrary craziness with documents!
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4. SoftTalker ◴[16 May 25 19:08 UTC] No.44008828{3}[source]▶
Does (did) Word even have "codes" as such? I thought it was quite different from WP in that regard. Modern Word .docx is an XML format now anyway.
5. themadturk ◴[16 May 25 22:21 UTC] No.44010283[source]▶
Part of the appeal of WordPerfect (and Reveal Codes) in the legal industry was the ability to create a document that look exactly what you needed it to look like. Appellate briefs, as I remember, had to be no more than a certain number of pages of text of a certain font and point size with specified margins and line spacing, and doing that in Word was doable but a nightmare.