[duane1024]

I started this project because I was nostalgic for Lotus 1-2-3, but I really really really loved WordPerfect. I'm afraid of starting that project, however, as it might take over my life :) I used to use WordPerfect 5.1 on a 386 PC to edit my school newspaper with multiple columns, graphics, custom fonts, etc. No WYSIWYG, just the power of Alt+F3 (Reveal Codes)!

[kstrauser]

WP5.1 gave me some fun times. I was in the Navy and transferred to a school with a month or so to kill before class started. They dropped me into a data processing office as something to do while I waited. The job was easy: read a file off a floppy, put it into the right format in WP, print it, and repeat. I discovered WP’s macro language and automated my way into a cushy job: instead of the 16 reports a day we were suppose to process, I could do about 20 an hour.

My boss was impressed, thanked me profusely, and told me to STFU about it. We’d come to work in the morning and knock out the day’s work in an hour, piddle around until lunch, then go home and enjoy the San Diego weather for the rest of the day.

That was a pretty terrific couple of months.

[gerdesj]

I still have an original cardboard strip with the function key codes on it somewhere. Ctrl-F9 ... font (I think, it was rather a long time ago).

[kcartlidge]

If asked, I often name WordPerfect 4.2 as the best software I ever used. And that it was written in assembly is incredible.

The book Almost Perfect [1] details those early times at WordPerfect.

Incidentally, amongst the other best software I'd be tempted by Lotus 123, DataEase 4.53, Turbo Pascal 3, and Elite (BBC).

[1] http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml

[somat]

Reveal Codes is a good start, but if I remember correctly they were read only. you could not close the loop and enter codes.

Reveal codes in a small way made me swear off word processing for good. We had an office document in wp 8 or 9 if remember correctly, you know the type, it lived on a shared drive and whoever needed to make changes did. anyhow it was a complete mess, internal corruption all over the place, no consistent style. one night I sat down with it and thanks to reveal codes I was able to clean it up. At which point I had a revelation, most of the sins of the document were due to the WYSIWYG interface. I was able to fix it because I could(almost) see the source. Why not cut the middleman write the document in source and render it to the final form. So I rewrote it in html. and have had a lingering resentment of word processors ever since.

You know why they call them word processors right?... Ever see what a food processor does to food?

[devilbunny]

Ami Pro 3.1 was WYSIWYG with reveal codes. You could move the tags around, though I don't recall if you could enter them directly. Also happened to have the best WYSIWYG equation editor I've ever used.

Not the most stable software in the world, but I loved it. It made writing lab reports as a chemistry major so much simpler (especially combined with ChemDraw).