One day this summer I had, via a random internet post, nostalgia for something I never used: WordPerfect for DOS.
I started WordPerfect with version 6.0a (or something similar), on Windows 95. My parents had WordPerfect, but the site of that blue screen with just a blinking cursor scared me off.
There was a printout of the different key commands that sat onmtop of our keyboard, reminding me of this program made of, no doubt, pure dark magic.
And yet here we are.
I looked up how to start FreeDOS, which is where this story really started. It was the 20th for FreeDOS and I thought it would be fun to run it under qemu.
So, while on vacation watching the summer Olympics, I started following tutorials and learning how to run anything, much less FreeDOS under qemu.
(I have tried and failed many times to get virtual box running on Fedora for my Windows 2000 needs…)
And once it was up and running, then came the next question: now wat?
The answer seemed to be, for some reason: WordPerfect. So, more tutorials, more tweaks and there it was, that blue screen from my youth that I dreaded so.
And now, it is sorta calming, sorta quaint. Still very blue. Ok, so I figured out how to change that, and it is now an orange, which I do like better.
I should not have been surprised at the features in WordPerfect for DOS, but I was. It was the standard at the time. I had not realized the blue screen was the writing mode, it is the ‘Text View’ where you input, and there is in fact a graphical view that shows the actual page layout.
That separation of writing and layout was ahead of its time, I think.
So, am I going to follow Martin and Walton in the path of only writing in obscure ancient word processors? No… Just another tool, another thing to have to play with, to feed the distracted mind to get the fingers dancing from time to time.
Running WP under FreeDOS has one quirk for sure: you can’t easily transfer files from the virtual machine to the main computer. For that, I made a quick bash script which mounts the image, copies the fires to the main machine, and unmounts. Not sophisticated, but functional.
From there, the wpd files can be opened into LibreOffice, or I can, as I did with this, simply save them as txt files.
(Fun fact, WordPerfect spell check did not recognize “internet” as a word, and Firefox did not know “WordPerfect”)