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274 points rbanffy | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.698s | source
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90s_dev ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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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1. asveikau ◴[] No.44006898[source]
I recall hearing that WordPerfect usage survived longer in the legal field.

I also remember in the late 90s, before StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice took off, WordPerfect had a resurgence on Linux, because there was a need for a word processor. I seem to recall a distro shipping with it prominently. Was it Corel Linux?

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2. saltcured ◴[] No.44007569[source]
I remember when WordPerfect vs Wordstar was the religious debate in the PC world like vi vs emacs. As Macs brought WYSIWYG and desktop publishing to consumers and small business, things got messy.

Does anybody remember AMI Pro? I think that was where I first started to learn about "paragraph styles" and the disciplined way someone could use these WYSIWYG editors a bit like one can use LaTeX styles. Assign styles abstractly, then be able to change in one place and modify all occurrences throughout a document.

However, this just set me up for decades of frustration as the vast majority of business users cannot be bothered to use any discipline at all. Documents would be littered with overlapping bits of manual formatting that would drive me insane with their impossible interactions. And if they defined paragraph styles, it was as endless litter of new styles so that they were hardly ever reused.

It may be my Wordstar indoctrination coming through, but I think these tools would all be better with explicit markup for boundaries, so you could escape the madness of never being able to predict, "which implied style(s) are going to apply to the next character I type with the current cursor position?"

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3. buescher ◴[] No.44007941[source]
You can lock down almost all the manual formatting in Word (i.e. allow styles only), and you can make a template out of it too.
4. themadturk ◴[] No.44010300[source]
I remember a version of WordPerfect on an AT&T Unix workstation someone was selling in the early/mid-90s. I wanted one so bad.