Digging through my archives this past weekend, I came across a letter I had written over 20 years ago.
It’s an old WordPerfect file, so I fired up a copy of DOSBox, the DOS emulator. I still have a copy of WordPerfect 5.1, the copy I bought back in 1989. It’s installed and accessible from DOSBox, so I can relive the 1990s any time I want.
Figure 1. The WordPerfect 5.1 upgrade box. Software actually came this way back in the olden days.
Figure 2. My upgrade certificate, which was kept with the manual in the software box.
The WordPerfect copy I have — and I don’t know why I hang on to such things — isn’t the original WordPerfect 4.2 I bought back in 1986. I probably purged that copy when I upgraded to 5.1 (shown in Figure 1).
I’m glad I still have that box. Not only is it a sacred relic, it shows that once upon a time, software did actually come in heavy-duty boxes complete with floppy diskettes and manuals. Good manuals too: My WordPerfect 5.1 copy actually has dog-eared corners, post-it notes, and all sorts of highlighted text. It was a complex beast of a program, and it’s actually still beloved by many, especially in the legal profession.
The letter I found in the archives has a file date of January 1, 1970. That’s the default Unix file date, and it makes sense: The original letter was written April 19, 1991. Most likely it was written using WordPerfect 5.1 or perhaps 5.2. And, yes, back then people actually wrote letters as opposed to composing email messages. When the old DOS file was copied to my Mac, the date format was lost. But the document itself shows the date April 19, 1991.
Email existed in 1991, of course. Back then I had a CompuServe address and an MCI Mail address and a Prodigy email address. I probably also had an early Internet email address, but few people used them back then. No, composing a message in a word processor, printing it out on paper, and putting a stamp on en envelope was the way things went.
For historical reference, the message is displayed in Figure 3.
Figure 3. This letter met with quite promising results.
I think I’ve got WordPerfect disks somewhere… they’re the old 5.25″ disks too! Seems a bit strange to see a word processor that isn’t WYSIWYG.
Comment by linuxlove — August 9, 2013 @ 7:04 pm
That thing smoked! It only got lousy when they started making it quasi-GUI with WordPerfect 6. That was clever, but slow. The beauty of WordPerfect was that the screen was blank. That’s also what drove people nuts: It was NOT intuitive.
Comment by admin — August 9, 2013 @ 8:05 pm