cctalk Digest, Vol 25, Issue 10

[Liam Proven]

On 11 July 2016 at 03:41, Fred <fred at miser.misernet.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 9 Jul 2016 cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
>
> [talk about word processors, specifically WordPerfect]
>
> I would LOVE to find a (hobbyist) copy of WordPerfect for OpenVMS some
> day.  Back in the day I could fly through those key combos on WP 5.1 ...


Ahh, yes. I did install one instance of MS Word 5 on SCO Xenix/386.
That was... interesting. The client had 2 printers, a high-speed
dot-matrix and a slower, higher-quality one. Getting the font support
for Word working with both was a significant exercise. I think I wrote
more and longer shell scripts for that single job than all the rest of
my entire career (& hobbyist use) put together.

Word worked surprisingly well. A 9600bps Wyse-60 struggled to keep up
with Word's inverse-video highlighting, but if you were patient, or
used block select rather than character-by-character
(Ctrl+Shift+cursors instead of Shift+cursors) it could keep up.

A _lot_ of work to get it all working, and honestly, while it did
work, it didn't work particularly well. I think the client replaced
terminals with PCs + a terminal emulator for people who needed WP
functionality. They could print to the Xenix printer spools and that
worked fairly well. Some clever PC terminal emulator from James
River... [*Googles*]

Ah, yes, ICE.TEN I think it was:
http://www.icetcp.com/

I can't remember if I ever saw or used WordPerfect on Xenix. Maybe.

I did want to see if I could find an old copy of Word for Xenix and
run it under Xenix compatibility on a modern Linux, but I never could
find it, and I think Linux's Xenix-compatibility functionality was
quietly deprecated and dropped decades ago...

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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