[PLUG] OT: WordPerfect vs. Word Star

[JP Vossen via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

The specific details of this are OT for the list, but the concepts are relevant, and I hope interesting.

Everyone keeps talking about WordPerfect in the "My Holy Quest for a WYSIWYG HTML Word Processor," but I never liked that product.  I started out using MultiMate, which I understand was a clone from the late 1970's Wang Word Processor.  But then I switched to WordStar [1] and never looked back until I moved to GUI tools (mostly Word or Mac or Windows, which didn't suck too badly at the time).

This is just more of the cyclical nature of IT.  I'm mangling and over-simplifying quite a bit here but:  The originals were markup notations like troff and LaTeX, then we went WYSIWYG with things like WordPerfect (and its famous "let me see the markup so I can fix it, because GUIs *always* screw it up, err, I mean, "reveal codes").  Then text again with HTML, followed by the HTML WYSIWYG tools.  Meanwhile the GUI tools got worse and worse, and the wiki markup notations were re-born.

Now a lot of editors have Markdown Live Preview, and I'm wondering when we'll get Markdown WYSIWYG (or maybe I've missed one?).  But it will have "edit source code" (AKA...well, you know), because just in case.  Come to think of it Zim [2] is a markup WYSIWYG editor, it just doesn't speak Markdown yet.

Anyway, the cool thing about WordStar was that it was basically just markup, though we didn't call it that then, and it had "dot commands" which were basically command macros.  They were on a line by themselves and started with a "." to do things like page breaks, font changes, and all sorts of things like that (that should sound familiar to lots of old-school folks).  *If* I remember correctly, it had a "page preview" renderer instead of WYSIWYG, but I also preferred to work in the source anyway.  You focus more on content that way, and get distracted by layout and appearance less.  You can mess with that stuff at the end.

WordStar was also more recoverable in case of disk(ette) error, where WordPerfect was a (simple) binary format.  That's important.  These days it's important because you avoid vendor lock-in and can use textutils and such.  But back in the day it was important when your data was mostly stored on floppy disks that could be easily damaged.

I ran the University of Pittsburgh's "Disk Recovery Service" for a couple of years, circa 1990, mostly WordPerfect for DOS and Word for Mac.  The Mac was tricky, because it would auto-eject 3.5" diskettes it didn't recognize, so I had a combination of Symantec and other Mac specific tools to fiddle with there.  Often it was a bad sector on the floppy, so I could get back everything except whatever was in the sector.  But then WordPerfect would choke on the broken binary format when it was reading the file and got the to mangled/missing part.

I ended up writing a program in C that removed ASCII < 0x20 (except for 0x09, 0x0a, 0x0d) and > 0x7e.  In other words, it stripped out everything except for tab, CR, LF, alphanumerics, and punctuation, leaving behind just plain text.  All formatting was lost, but the content was (mostly) there and could be opened in WP and re-formatted.  I was even able to recover data that had been on diskettes that went through the laundry that way!

I still have WordStar 5.25" installation floppy disks someplace.  I have 5.25" diskette drives too, but I'm not sure I'm going to bother installing one and trying to get WS to run in anything.  :-)

Later,
JP

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar, the list of "Notable users" is interesting
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zim_(software)
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