Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died(heraldextra.com) |
Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died(heraldextra.com) |
I preferred runoff/[t]roff and vi
It does appear to be a better article though, so if someone finds a link that people can actually read, we can swap it back.
(Emailed as well.)
My first computer [1] didn't have Microsoft Word on it, but it had WordPerfect installed with the OEM Windows. I've always had really horrid handwriting so I preferred to type out all my homework since I was twelve or so, so I had to use whatever I could to do so, and WordPerfect was there.
I grew to actually really like it, and I used it for about two years until my hard drive crashed, I had to reinstall Windows, and then I installed StarOffice (which Google was giving away for free from Google Pack or something like that).
Still, I liked WordPerfect, and looking at the history it seems like it was actually quite significant; a part of me feels like it should have been the de facto word processor instead of Word.
[1] Not counting the hand me down Commodore 64 I got as a pretty young kid.
I also had a hand me down commodore 64 before that. My uncle donated this when he got his first PC. I taught myself basic on that. And with a few peeks and pokes managed a simple game even. Alas, I had no disk drive and never thought to actually save my creations anywhere. Like on the tape drive I did have. The commodore 64 was great though. And my uncle bundled some introductory computer science stuff with it (a primer on bits and bytes) that along with the excellent C64 manual went a long way to got me into programming. My local library was useless. I had no access to information. There was no internet (at least not accessible to me; I had not even heard of it). But that C64 manual got me curious and I had nothing better to do. I did not realize it at the time but that bit of commodore 64 documentation and computer science intro is what changed my life.
The PC I got after that was relatively boring because it did not include anything useful in terms of documentation. Starved of information, I dove into Wordperfect.
Once I got my own computer I started doing everything on it, primarily because teachers genuinely could not read my handwriting. This sometimes required me to retype the worksheets in some capacity, but fortunately my teachers never had a problem with me doing that (maybe because they knew the alternative would be an unreadable mess). I learned algebra and calculus via the use of MathType (which Florida's online school gave a free license and I took one class virtually), and it's to a point now where I can almost never find a pen when I need one because I type everything out, since I haven't really practiced writing with by hand for about twenty years. I genuinely get kind of uncomfortable doing any kind of math with pen and paper now, since I'm so used to MathType and now LaTeX.
I never did a depth-first analysis of the features of WordPerfect, just the superficial stuff to make basic documents, but I did like using it. I don't remember any of the keystrokes anymore, but I did learn them when I was first using it.
Yeah, usually what would happen is I'd turn in 3-4 assignments with my handwriting, my teachers would see that it's completely illegible, they'd ask me about it, and in that conversation I would say "if you want I'm happy enough to type it out". To be clear, my handwriting is really, really, bad, I usually can't even read it myself. It was slightly better in high school since I was writing more often but the teachers really would have trouble. Usually for tests where I had to do things with a pen and paper, I would do my work with my illegible stuff, then very very slowly and painstakingly write the final answer as clean as I could and then circle it.
I guess I got lucky with having some teachers that were OK with it. A part of me kind of feels like I should have just worked on my penmanship but I genuinely do think that there are a lot of advantages to doing math with TeX or MathType. One thing I really like is that since copying takes no effort, there's no reason to not show every step, no matter how insignificant. I think my teachers appreciated that too; when I would make a mistake, it was never ambiguous to where the mistake happened because every step was displayed.
But what struck me reading this obituary is that he was a graduate of Brigham Young University, lived in Utah, and was a strong LGTBQ+ advocate, appearing to be a member of that community himself. I can't imagine that was easy, especially in the past (googling shows it is still condemned by the LDS church today) and he seems to have tackled it through very strong philanthropy and support.
Kudos. Kindness and support for those who need it is a greater legacy than any technology.
I wasn’t out as gay yet, maybe only 15 years old. Of course, it would have been a death sentence for a teenager in Southern Idaho to come out as gay. One day though, Mike told me “You know, you can grow up here and you can be /different/ in many different kinds of ways, you can be a band nerd, a guy who writes software, you can be gay, you can be /yourself/ and no matter what some adults might tell you right now, you will be okay. Not only okay, but you can live a fulfilled and successful life while being authentic and true to yourself. You are never the person that these adults claim you are. They don’t know anything.“ He then went on to tell me Bruce’s story and how in his opinion, of course, Bruce wasn’t “evil” or “wrong” for being gay.
In 2005, I wrote my technology teacher a personal thank you letter. I wrote one to Bruce as well and I asked if it could be shared with him.
Bruce took the time to respond:
Dear Brian,
Thank you for taking the time to write your letter. I was very moved by your story. There were parts that really reminded me of some of my own experiences in life.
The beautiful thing about life, at least as I have seen it, is that if you keep trying and never doubt yourself, you really can make amazing things happen both in yourself and in the world around you. I am sure you too have already touched many people around you and have been a positive influence for them. That's so very important. You may never realize the good you are doing, but it is happening.
Being gay is becoming more and more accepted as "normal" and one day maybe it just won't matter. As for being a geek, I don't consider that a bad term. The world needs geeks. But then they need gays too!
Thanks again,
Bruce BastianImagine that all web editors emitted a proprietary document format that wasn't documented anywhere except in the editor that wrote a file and the viewer that interpreted it. You lived with this because that's just the way it was done. It was common to get a web page into such a state that 2/3 of the page was red, one column was RTL for some reason, and everything was in italics except for the 1 word you wanted to be that way.
You were used to this. It wasn't great, but that's life.
And then someone released a web editor with a "reveal HTML" setting that suddenly showed you that `<font color="red">` tag that messed everything up and allowed you to delete it.
That's what Reveal Codes did for us. It was a revelation.
Everything in WordPerfect was just markup, and it was editable markup at that.
Surprising really that there really isn't a word processor that basically uses HTML.
Related (from Wikipedia references):
https://www.deseret.com/utah/2024/06/17/word-perfect-co-foun...
https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/bruce-bastian-co-fo...
https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-mou...
https://www.legacy.com/news/celebrity-deaths/bruce-bastian-1...
I still use WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS
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.
Famous for supporting every printer manufactured on planet Earth - 3 disks of printer drivers.
Afaik it was written in assembler hence the tough time when they needed to move to more modern OS/2 with Presentation Manager and then later Windows 3.
Also, when they supported video cards for print preview, similarly they had extensive support.
I remember it took a LONG time before there was a Windows version of WordPerfect which I think took a lot of their momentum away. Combine that with Microsoft basically giving away Office or bundling Word+Excel they succeeded in eroding market share from Lotus / WordPerfect.
I think the Lotus Suite may have even pre-dated MSFT Office as a suite (not 100% certain) and as usual functionality was often superior or better implemented than MSFT's.
Credit should also go to WordPerfect for making a Linux version in the 2000's before Linux desktop was as mature as it is today. Sadly they didn't continue this effort.
I'm glad we have LibreOffice but it's frankly a clone of MSFT Office, the UI is very cluttered and it has the same "weirdisms" that Office has.
Microsoft Office for Mac arrived in 1989, the Windows version came in 1990. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_office
By the time I moved to PCs I could use Windows 3.x and MS Word, so I lived through college in the late 80s and early 90s without ever using WP. But I still learned to understand the meaning, reason and power of reveal codes.
One of the challenges I had was printing french accented characters on a LaserJet+ clone - an issue I never resolved, and didn't encounter in the DOS version on my parent's PC.
Here's an example of someone bumping against that: https://www.wpuniverse.com/vb/forum/wordperfect/troubleshoot...
Sorry, man.
---
But does that mean you have some good lawyer jokes to share?
Professional courtesy.
(I have a million of these from my lawyer friends.)
Anyway, I wasn't aware of Bruce Bastian specifically but the Mormon/LGBT angle stands out. It must have taken a lot of character to be out so publicly in that community.
(The LDS church's response to legalization of gay marriage was to excommunicate anyone who got married to someone of the same sex, and to bar their children from baptism and advancement unless they disavowed their parents' relationship. The policy was rescinded in 2019. In earlier times one could get excommunicated simply for _being_ gay.)
It looks like Bruce and his husband made some appearances on Mormon Stories podcast if you want some inside baseball: https://www.mormonstories.org/?s=bruce+bastian
I met one of the Lotus cofounders on a group bicycling vacation tour in Europe. While legally blind at the time, he had a strategy for participating without crashing into anyone else.
I had an old, bulky laptop, Windows 3.11, and then WordPerfect 6. Of course, everything had to be installed from disk.
This was my technically totally limited writing setup, however I was very productive with it and enjoyed the setup.
Even on Windows 95, WordPerfect was my tool of choice. MS Word overtook only because WP crashed too often and the beneficial Grammar tool was lagging behind.
I felt sad the moment I had to let go of WP. Even thinking about it today feels crazy. I never ever again felt an emotional rift after switching to another tool. It was only this one time with WP.
I think Corel bought WP and somewhat tried to revive WP, but this came too late.
When Windows got to be a thing, my law firm considered switching to WP for Windows because WP 5.1 for DOS was the unquestioned industry standard for lawyers. But we surveyed our clients (almost all of them were big companies) and learned that they were going over to Word for Windows. So we said, "who gives a [hoot] what other law firms are using" and switched to Word for Windows. It was more than a bit of a downgrade from WP 5.1 in DOS
Your changes have been saved, Bruce. RIP
Good times. http://xahlee.info/kbd/wordperfect_shortcuts_strip.html
Others have posted their favorite shortcuts (and Reveal Codes truly was magical); my most used ones I haven't seen mentioned were Ctrl+Shift+F1 and Alt+Shift+F1. IIRC, those were spell check and thesaurus, respectively.
RIP Bruce, you made the world a better place for millions.
Nowadays, though, the place is pretty much built out, and the land prices have spiked accordingly since most of the nearby areas are BLM land. Don't expect a next WordPerfect any time soon.
Either the numbers here are spun or Orem was extraordinarily cheap.
[1] This was right in the middle of the inflation crisis!
"He also eliminated the different typing modes which plagued the early word processors. With other products, if you were typing new text at the end of a document, you had to be in a Create mode. If you typed in the middle, you had to be in an Edit mode. In an Edit mode, your typing would erase existing text, so to insert text, you had to change to an Insert mode. Alan allowed the user to type anywhere in the document without a mode change"
And of course it's trendy writers' advice today to do not mix writing with editing. Create vs. Edit mode embodied that before it was popular.
You'd think that would push me towards emacs, but I just get the sense that neovim has a more active community.
But it's a whole thing. Ends up being a whole all-encompassing world view. It's my preferred editor, and I love and have memorized the default key bindings and window management years ago... but I also ... have a love hate thing with it. Something always needs tweaking and it takes so long to start.
One's a scum sucking bottom dweller and the other's a fish.
(Stopping with this one. It's fun trading these with attorney buddies but I don't want someone to take them out of context as an opportunity to start lawyer bashing.)
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.