Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect Co-Creator, Dies At 76 (wsj.com) 56
Longtime Slashdot reader regoli shares an obituary from the Wall Street Journal: When Alan Ashton was a computer-science professor at Brigham Young University in the mid-1970s, the director of the school's marching band knocked on his door and said he wanted to use a computer to choreograph the band's halftime shows. Ashton was easily persuaded; he was a trumpet player whose Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Utah was "Electronics, music and computers." Bruce Bastian, the graduate student who was working as BYU's marching-band director, turned out to be a quick learner. "He was very conscientious, very thorough," Ashton said in an interview, "and just absolutely brilliant." Within a few years, the two were at work on a program that would turn them into two of the richest people in the nation, founders of the company that made WordPerfect, the dominant word-processing software in the 1980s and early '90s and one of the first pieces of software many Americans bought when they brought home their first PCs.
But behind the hundreds of millions of dollars and blockbuster success, Bastian's personal life, he later said, was in "free fall." Between the time he and Ashton released what would later be known as WordPerfect to the public in 1980 and when they sold the company for $1.4 billion in 1994, Bastian told his wife, four sons and his Mormon community that he was gay and leaving both his marriage and the church. When he died, June 16, at the age of 76 from complications associated with pulmonary fibrosis, he had been living a different life: A longtime advocate for LGBTQ rights, Bastian was married to a man, and had found a way to maintain relationships with his family, who remained dedicated members of the church that rejected his sexual orientation. "I kind of have three parts of my life," he said in 2010 during one of several extensive interviews he gave to the Mormon Stories podcast, "the pre-WordPerfect life, the WordPerfect years, and now the LGBT years." Other publications remembering Bruce Bastian include: The New York Times, The Salt Lake Tribune, University of Utah, and Human Rights Campaign.
But behind the hundreds of millions of dollars and blockbuster success, Bastian's personal life, he later said, was in "free fall." Between the time he and Ashton released what would later be known as WordPerfect to the public in 1980 and when they sold the company for $1.4 billion in 1994, Bastian told his wife, four sons and his Mormon community that he was gay and leaving both his marriage and the church. When he died, June 16, at the age of 76 from complications associated with pulmonary fibrosis, he had been living a different life: A longtime advocate for LGBTQ rights, Bastian was married to a man, and had found a way to maintain relationships with his family, who remained dedicated members of the church that rejected his sexual orientation. "I kind of have three parts of my life," he said in 2010 during one of several extensive interviews he gave to the Mormon Stories podcast, "the pre-WordPerfect life, the WordPerfect years, and now the LGBT years." Other publications remembering Bruce Bastian include: The New York Times, The Salt Lake Tribune, University of Utah, and Human Rights Campaign.
best word processor (Score:5, Informative)
WordPerfect 5.x is the best word processor ever.
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WordPerfect 5.x is the best word processor ever.
Where are my mod points? Absolutely. Hands down. Best ever. To this day nothing remotely compares to it's ease of use and functionality. Reveal codes was like open source. You could see what was going on.
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Where are my mod points? Absolutely. Hands down. Best ever. To this day nothing remotely compares to it's ease of use and functionality. Reveal codes was like open source. You could see what was going on.
So missed. Microsoft Word does this. I'll paste in some text and realize it has formatting. I still think plain text should be the default. I delete the formatted text, but now when I add stuff it is in bold. I delete the area around the bold and still bold. Bold isn't highlighted anywhere I click, but adding text bold turns on again. When something like that happened in WordPerfect, you just hit reveal codes and you could tell exactly why. Once you understood how the underlying codes worked, you cou
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I used Wang WP on the 286 I had, I could not grasp WP 5.1 when I gave it a try. I found an old brand new copy for sale for 5 USD like 15 years ago.
But from what I have read, Bruce was a supporter the LGBT community early on. To me that is quite a thing for a business man to do back then. RIP
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If that were the case, most everyone wouldn't be using Microsoft Word.
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Everyone knows the best software always wins. No other considerations affect this outcome.
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Everyone knows the best software always wins.
By definition.
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And LO Calc is better than Excel from 20 years ago.
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And LO Calc is better than Excel from 20 years ago.
No way, LO Calc pivot tables suck ass and there is no counter part to excel's embedded power bi.
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In my town, 35 years ago, WordPerfect was the preferred word processor. A few years later, MS Office for Windows 3.1 changed that. So I learnt a whole productivity suite, instead.
WordPerfect 20 years ago ...
Alternative opinion: 35 years ago, its inconsistent UI and lack of printer support made it second-rate software.
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As far as I know, they never had a Mac version either.
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That is false, PCs may have been shipped with Windows, but not with Office, Office was always very expensive. You probably think of MS Works. But MS Office was so easy to pirate, it was ridiculous... A valid key for Office 97 was 1112-111111.
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Words dominance has nothing to do with it being a superior product, on almost all metrics that *clearly* isn't true. Words dominance comes down to bundling and Microsoft's ability to exploit licensing to force it on corporations for long enough that it became the default.
Re:best word processor (Score:5, Interesting)
WordPerfect flubbed the transition to Windows. Not only did they ship late, but they didn't think it over properly.
I was a hardcore user of WP5.1 for DOS (best word processor ever, IMO), and had all the function key combos burned down to muscle memory (yes, including all the Ctrl Shift Alt ones). When my company switched to Windows, I naturally tried WP for Windows. I was horrified to see that the key combinations didn't work the same anymore. Some of the functions hadn't been migrated at all, some had been moved around, others were only available via menus. However, Word for Windows had a WP compatibility mode which did support most of the WP for DOS keys! I had to switch to Word because, ironically, it was a better WordPerfect than WordPerfect for Windows.
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Microsoft manipulation in the corporate environment and setting Word pricing at low/free levels is what killed them. They were not setup for the vertical integration that was stacked against them. Lotus and a couple others died the same way.
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Corel.
Re: best word processor (Score:2)
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If that were the case, most everyone wouldn't be using Microsoft Word.
I switched from WP to Word because my company made us all do so. We understood this was because an MS delegation and our directors had a good lunch together. It amazes me when I read here that many people have a choice of what software they use at work; our work PCs are locked down.
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So, you have no idea why.
There was a lawsuit in the late nineties, which M$$$$ lost, for basically bribing OEMs to install Dirt, er, Word on their systems as delivered.
Unfortunately, WP's marketing department couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag with the help of the Terminator.
Wish LibreOffice would offer a WP interface.
Re: best word processor (Score:2)
Re: best word processor (Score:2)
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Wordperfect was my ultimate word processor. It was *hard* to learn compared to word, because it made formatting explicit so you had to know what all the formatting stuff meant, but once you did, it was *easier* to reason about your document, because if something didn't look why you always could see the exact reason.
Word is a perfectly servicable piece of software, and has proven itself in the real world, but I still believe Wordperfect ran rings about it in terms of its capabilities and ability to be highly
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WordPerfect 5.x is the best word processor ever.
100% true !
Software that just let you get the job done, without getting in the way.
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WordPerfect 5.x is the best word processor ever.
100% true !
Software that just let you get the job done, without getting in the way.
Absolutely. Its been a while, but looking back it was my greatest surge in quality, quantity, and speed for all of my administrative workflow productivity! I have never found any application experience since that so profoundly improved my workflow. It was intuitive, well documented, easy to master features without getting bogged down with certifications, and making my job and life instantaneously better.... with the Flintstones.
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Well, it would have been nice, if it weren't for all those F keys! So I'd suggest 5.1 was significantly easier to use for those of didn't have all those function keys memorized.
Still miss it (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't care what people say, I think WordPerfect was the best word processor at the time, and all the way up to its demise. The idea of having codes AND styles and the ability to see them (reveal codes) was one key to its ease of use and power.
It was my primary word processor under several Unixen (first under text terminals, then graphic terminals, then full GUI/X11), and then Linux, until Corel finally killed it and we were forced to move to the MS model with StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice. The latter are very decent, but follows the MS-Word model which I don't particularly like. Of course, that is what makes it easy for people to jump into. (PS, we also used Corel Draw under Unix/Linux; and Star/Open/LibreOffice could replace all that functionality). Still, I miss WordPerfect.
Anyway, hats off to Mr. Bastian.
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Maybe I just got spoiled by Microsoft Word in college, but I kinda hated having to remember all of the keyboard shortcuts for WordPerfect. Compared to a WYSIWYG text editor, using style codes and remembering the weird color combinations that represented different fonts and style choices in WordPerfect was a pain in the ass.
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You are comparing apples to oranges, there.
WordPerfect had a full GUI with WYSIWYG at the same time era MS-Word did. You are probably thinking of an older [non-GUI] version of WordPerfect compared to a newer version of MS-Word, and that isn't a fair comparison :)
I will also point out that, even in the pre-GUI WordPerfect, you didn't HAVE to use the shortcuts or function keys (with those neat paper/plastic templates). You could open a "curses" type menu and select with the cursor keys. Of course, that isn
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I think that I went from WordPerfect 5.1 on my first PC in 1991 to Microsoft Word for Windows 6 in 1993. I know that it's not really fair to compare the two as equals, but it really was "only" one version newer software and the ease of use difference for formatting was like night and day. But, hell, I was a computer noob back then. Nowadays, I probably spend more time using vi in a Linux console session, and that's about as user hostile as text editors get.
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You didn't need to remember anything... every keyboard had the little template over the function keys because it was just that good. I think I first started using it in 1988 for a school project at a friend's house. You could so easily control things that to this day are a challenge with Word (and the other WYSIWYG options). Markdown is mostly good enough for my needs today, but back then...
Next we need an update on the Netwinder!
Re: Still miss it (Score:2)
Does markdown fulfill your needs to see codes as well as have wysiwyg? Or do you have more advanced formatting needs that aren't expressive in it?
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Markdown doesn't support basic formatting tools like tabs, or centred text. You can bodge some of it by inserting raw HTML, but that kind of defeats the purpose of Markdown.
Why does the worst thing always become the de-facto standard?
Reveal codes (Score:1)
Re:Reveal codes (Score:4, Informative)
Best feature ever. All other word processors missed the boat on that.
Do you perchance mean this boat [tug.org]?
I remember when I finally learned LaTeX and I thought, hey, this is just like the reveal codes in WP 5.1. I mainly used WP under DOS, so the formatting capabilities would be quite limited while editing, and there was a separate preview functionality in graphics mode. So there were three different levels of working with the text. LaTeX goes straight from the codes to graphics, but for a kind of intermediate level, there's LyX.
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The only reason "Reveal Codes" was useful, was because the WYSIWYG editors were buggy, and you couldn't be sure that, under the hood, it was really doing what you wanted when you changed formatting.
To this very day... (Score:1)
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We should all press ctlr-F7 in respect (Score:2)
WP 5.1 was possibly the best DOS based software package made, really solid program... Word has never been as good IMHO...
Oh and reveal codes is F11.
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it printed what I expected every single time (Score:1)
While I hated learning the keystrokes I loved that it always printed exactly as I expected it to.
How many trees had to die to get my Word docs to look the way I wanted it to.. print, judge the output formatting, tweak, and repeat
WordPerfect (Score:4, Insightful)
WordPerfect was best, Excel was what sold MS Office.
It was said that MS raced through numbering their word processor so that on the shelf when next to WordPerfect, word V6 looked better than WP 5.x
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I always preferred Word for two reasons:
1. You didn't have to "Reveal Codes" because it was much better at getting it right based on UI input alone.
2. It started, out of the gate, with dropdown menus, making it much simpler to use functions that were less common.
Shift+F7 to print (Score:2)
Working at a computer lab in college this was the most asked question: "How do I print in WordPerfect?"