Bruce Bastian, a Founder of WordPerfect, Is Dead at 76
July 5, 2024 10:10 AM Subscribe
A favorite of early personal computer users, his company was eventually overtaken by Microsoft Word. He later came out as gay and became an L.G.B.T.Q. activist. “I don’t think straight people can begin to imagine the inner turmoil and fear at this moment in a gay person’s life,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune. “All your dreams, plans, everything falls apart. The whole foundation of your life crumbles. You can stay the course or follow your heart and go to where every human being dreams of going — to happiness ever after.”
Thank. you, Bruce.
Thank. you, Bruce.
I recently ordered a tiny new-silicon 386 laptop specifically so I could use it as no-internet-possible writing environment and my plan was to try out WordPerfect 6.0 as the word processor. I had no idea about Bastian and his philanthropy and now I'm very curious to learn more about him, and his relationship to the LDS church after coming out. So many ex-Mormons are so often the coolest people you'll meet
posted by dis_integration at 10:35 AM on July 5 [7 favorites]
posted by dis_integration at 10:35 AM on July 5 [7 favorites]
I, also, am an ongoing WordPerfect user. Thanks, Bruce. You wrote the better program. You should have won.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:50 AM on July 5 [8 favorites]
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:50 AM on July 5 [8 favorites]
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posted by adrienneleigh at 11:00 AM on July 5
posted by adrienneleigh at 11:00 AM on July 5
I wonder if anyone has calculated the economic cost of clearly superior products that get supplanted by BS extractive monopolies. I spend a few years supporting Windows PCs in small businesses and it was always interesting to witness the politics of admin staff who had enough clout to resist the forces pushing them toward MS Word. One of the few aspects of the job that I enjoyed.
posted by Depressed Obese Nightmare Man at 11:09 AM on July 5 [3 favorites]
posted by Depressed Obese Nightmare Man at 11:09 AM on July 5 [3 favorites]
WordPerfect (pre-Windows) was clearly the better word processor on the PC. But Microsoft Word 5 on the Mac was way better than anything else at the time. Arguably, it might be better than anything on the Mac right now.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 11:19 AM on July 5 [2 favorites]
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 11:19 AM on July 5 [2 favorites]
Back in the 80’s, there was a much better editor for the Mac called Fullwrite. Small company, couldn’t compete with Microsoft. The 3.0 release of Word around that time was a non-functional disaster. When Fullwrite disappeared, I looked at WordPerfect, but the powers that be were with Office. I hate Word. Then and now. Pages is ok. But luckily most of my word processing days are over, except helping friends still using Word get around its crappiness.
posted by njohnson23 at 11:28 AM on July 5 [1 favorite]
posted by njohnson23 at 11:28 AM on July 5 [1 favorite]
I still despise that damn Ribbon. Who's idea was it to take a system where you could always reasonably find a function on one of several lists into scanning a bunch of buttons of different sizes and shapes for the one you want? I've come to prefer LibreOffice to Word for that reason.
But Humble recently offered a bundle with WordPerfect and several other Corel products in it, and so I decided to grab it. Of the products included, Painter Essentials 8 simply doesn't start, the spreadsheet QuattroPro throws up spurious and work-disrupting error boxes when copying multiple cells at once, and CorelDraw and PhotoPaint Essentials both nag me to upgrade to the most recent version, which costs like $100 of course. But WP still works fine as near as I can tell.
posted by JHarris at 11:34 AM on July 5 [3 favorites]
But Humble recently offered a bundle with WordPerfect and several other Corel products in it, and so I decided to grab it. Of the products included, Painter Essentials 8 simply doesn't start, the spreadsheet QuattroPro throws up spurious and work-disrupting error boxes when copying multiple cells at once, and CorelDraw and PhotoPaint Essentials both nag me to upgrade to the most recent version, which costs like $100 of course. But WP still works fine as near as I can tell.
posted by JHarris at 11:34 AM on July 5 [3 favorites]
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WordPerfect was what all the law offices used in the 1990s when I started there. The switch to Word happened while I was working that job. In some ways it was easier for me to use Word; I'd learned it in college on the Mac and Windows was similar enough. But there were good things about WP that I missed when it was gone.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 12:24 PM on July 5
WordPerfect was what all the law offices used in the 1990s when I started there. The switch to Word happened while I was working that job. In some ways it was easier for me to use Word; I'd learned it in college on the Mac and Windows was similar enough. But there were good things about WP that I missed when it was gone.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 12:24 PM on July 5
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posted by lalochezia at 12:27 PM on July 5
posted by lalochezia at 12:27 PM on July 5
In the afterlife all Codes will be Revealed
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posted by credulous at 12:35 PM on July 5 [18 favorites]
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posted by credulous at 12:35 PM on July 5 [18 favorites]
It was bravery on his part to take on the Mormon Church, an organization that people still defend and which is still somehow tax exempt despite its continued political interference.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:39 PM on July 5 [2 favorites]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:39 PM on July 5 [2 favorites]
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WordPerfect was the first word processor I used regularly, and it’s the only word processor which I never had to struggle against.
I didn’t know anything about its creator, but I’m glad to learn he did good in the world.
posted by Kattullus at 12:49 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]
WordPerfect was the first word processor I used regularly, and it’s the only word processor which I never had to struggle against.
I didn’t know anything about its creator, but I’m glad to learn he did good in the world.
posted by Kattullus at 12:49 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]
It was the mid-2000s when I discovered lawyers loved WP. A law firm that we worked with were always sending us Word documents that were oddly (really oddly) formatted. It turned out they used WP and only converted to Word format to send to us. I wonder if they ever switched.
posted by tommasz at 12:58 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]
posted by tommasz at 12:58 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]
But Microsoft Word 5 on the Mac was way better than anything else at the time.
WriteNow!
I will fight you.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:58 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]
WriteNow!
I will fight you.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:58 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]
"It was the mid-2000s when I discovered lawyers loved WP."
Very much this. This lawyer held out as long as he could. If I'm doing any internal document, or if I know it's likely not to require any changes on the outside, I'm still doing those legal docs in WP. Eventually, though, and I would guess pandemic-time, the outside pressure for Word docs got so great that I had to cave.
That WP's creator turns out to have been a mensch is a very happy discovery.
posted by Capt. Renault at 1:05 PM on July 5 [3 favorites]
Very much this. This lawyer held out as long as he could. If I'm doing any internal document, or if I know it's likely not to require any changes on the outside, I'm still doing those legal docs in WP. Eventually, though, and I would guess pandemic-time, the outside pressure for Word docs got so great that I had to cave.
That WP's creator turns out to have been a mensch is a very happy discovery.
posted by Capt. Renault at 1:05 PM on July 5 [3 favorites]
Was there a reason lawyers loved Word Perfect? I knew it was a thing, but I never knew why.
posted by hoyland at 1:10 PM on July 5
posted by hoyland at 1:10 PM on July 5
hoyland I have an answer to that!
I used to teach classes in Word for lawyers, legal secretaries, and paralegals forced to switch from Word Perfect.
Honestly, about 90% of the time it just boiled down to "it's what they were used to". WP was there first, lawyers and law firms were early adopters of word processing in general, so they got into WP early and stuck with it until they couldn't anymore.
The rest of the time it boils down to two words: reveal codes.
Wordperfect stores documents in a manner vaguely similar to how plain HTML or BB code works. If you have bold text that's because its enclosed by codes that tell it to make that text bold.
It normally operated in WYSIWYG mode, bold text just looked bold. But you could hit a button labeled "reveal codes" and it would show you all the markup that was changing how your document looked.
If you have a crazy complex document you can get stuff messed up and confused pretty easily, so being able to see what exactly was really going on is really handy.
Word doesn't have that feature, never did. Never will. The closest it has is a button to show you pragraph markers.
In part that's becuse Micrsoft didn't want people mucking around with document formatting on a low level. In part it's because unlike WP's format Word's old doc format was 100% proprietary and considered a corporate secret, having something like reveal codes would undermine efforts to keep the doc format secret.
But, also, structurally even back in the old doc days, but ESPECIALLY in the modern docx era, a Word file isn't fundamentally just text with markup. It split text up into sections, today it's actual XML back in the doc days it was more like XML or CSS than HTML in that it put a lot of the formatting into places you wouldn't expect to see it.
Today a single docx is actually a zip file containing dozens of xml docs including separate documents for header and footer and so on.
In WP reveal codes was trivial to implement. In Word even if they wanted to, and they didn't, reveal codes would have been a nightmare to implement and would have been a back engineered aproximation because fundamentally doc(x) format isn't a markup format.
Lawyers, and their office staff really liked having that sort of low level control of a document because they could find out exactly why a complex document was messed up and fix it, while in word you basically couldn't. Often you'd have to just copy the text out, paste it into notepad, delete the messed up section, paste in the plain text and start formatting all over again.
For a document with tables of contents, indexes, columns, lists, and so on sometimes brute force clearing formatting means you have a lot of work to do putting the formatting back on.
But, mostly, just because they were used to it.
posted by sotonohito at 1:31 PM on July 5 [18 favorites]
I used to teach classes in Word for lawyers, legal secretaries, and paralegals forced to switch from Word Perfect.
Honestly, about 90% of the time it just boiled down to "it's what they were used to". WP was there first, lawyers and law firms were early adopters of word processing in general, so they got into WP early and stuck with it until they couldn't anymore.
The rest of the time it boils down to two words: reveal codes.
Wordperfect stores documents in a manner vaguely similar to how plain HTML or BB code works. If you have bold text that's because its enclosed by codes that tell it to make that text bold.
It normally operated in WYSIWYG mode, bold text just looked bold. But you could hit a button labeled "reveal codes" and it would show you all the markup that was changing how your document looked.
If you have a crazy complex document you can get stuff messed up and confused pretty easily, so being able to see what exactly was really going on is really handy.
Word doesn't have that feature, never did. Never will. The closest it has is a button to show you pragraph markers.
In part that's becuse Micrsoft didn't want people mucking around with document formatting on a low level. In part it's because unlike WP's format Word's old doc format was 100% proprietary and considered a corporate secret, having something like reveal codes would undermine efforts to keep the doc format secret.
But, also, structurally even back in the old doc days, but ESPECIALLY in the modern docx era, a Word file isn't fundamentally just text with markup. It split text up into sections, today it's actual XML back in the doc days it was more like XML or CSS than HTML in that it put a lot of the formatting into places you wouldn't expect to see it.
Today a single docx is actually a zip file containing dozens of xml docs including separate documents for header and footer and so on.
In WP reveal codes was trivial to implement. In Word even if they wanted to, and they didn't, reveal codes would have been a nightmare to implement and would have been a back engineered aproximation because fundamentally doc(x) format isn't a markup format.
Lawyers, and their office staff really liked having that sort of low level control of a document because they could find out exactly why a complex document was messed up and fix it, while in word you basically couldn't. Often you'd have to just copy the text out, paste it into notepad, delete the messed up section, paste in the plain text and start formatting all over again.
For a document with tables of contents, indexes, columns, lists, and so on sometimes brute force clearing formatting means you have a lot of work to do putting the formatting back on.
But, mostly, just because they were used to it.
posted by sotonohito at 1:31 PM on July 5 [18 favorites]
"But, mostly, just because they were used to it."
'Used to it' also meaning 'working from well-loved precedents'. WP can handle that sustained, repeated use a lot better than Word.
posted by Capt. Renault at 1:53 PM on July 5 [3 favorites]
'Used to it' also meaning 'working from well-loved precedents'. WP can handle that sustained, repeated use a lot better than Word.
posted by Capt. Renault at 1:53 PM on July 5 [3 favorites]
I was expecting this thread to be full of dot-command tributes, but now I realize that was WordStar.
Creating a document in WordPerfect, especially with Reveal Codes turned on, was like programming. I imagine that's why it's popular with lawyers, as you can control exactly what is rendered, you can clean up nesting messes, and there's nothing hidden in the document (LOL MS Word debacles).
If you already knew WordPerfect, later learning to write in HTML was obvious and easy.
on preview: as sotonohito said in much longer form above
posted by intermod at 2:17 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]
Creating a document in WordPerfect, especially with Reveal Codes turned on, was like programming. I imagine that's why it's popular with lawyers, as you can control exactly what is rendered, you can clean up nesting messes, and there's nothing hidden in the document (LOL MS Word debacles).
If you already knew WordPerfect, later learning to write in HTML was obvious and easy.
on preview: as sotonohito said in much longer form above
posted by intermod at 2:17 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]
I started with WordPerfect 3.5 in 1988. Moved up to 5.0 when it came out and have never looked back; I continue to upgrade to the latest versions as they come out. In my experience, people who use Word and who insist on Word are in large part people who believe, because Word comes bundled with everything, that Word is somehow the gold standard. It most emphatically is not.
During my 30 year consulting career, which involved a ton of document development, I was forced to learn enough about Word to deal with clients who only used Word. I still did all the work in WordPerfect and was able to convert seamlessly to Word (at the end, when I was done), using various conversion protocols and macros. I consistently refused to work in Word in its native format because it was maddening, unpredictable, obtuse, and just generally a royal pain in the a55.
My current project is a novel I've been working on off and mostly on for 17 years. I am drawing to the end of the final and thorough revision process. It is 480,000 words divided into 212 chapters. The single document had indexes, table of contents, loads of graphic boxes, and WordPerfect handles it all with absolute ease.
posted by charris5005 at 2:52 PM on July 5 [5 favorites]
During my 30 year consulting career, which involved a ton of document development, I was forced to learn enough about Word to deal with clients who only used Word. I still did all the work in WordPerfect and was able to convert seamlessly to Word (at the end, when I was done), using various conversion protocols and macros. I consistently refused to work in Word in its native format because it was maddening, unpredictable, obtuse, and just generally a royal pain in the a55.
My current project is a novel I've been working on off and mostly on for 17 years. I am drawing to the end of the final and thorough revision process. It is 480,000 words divided into 212 chapters. The single document had indexes, table of contents, loads of graphic boxes, and WordPerfect handles it all with absolute ease.
posted by charris5005 at 2:52 PM on July 5 [5 favorites]
I was in the first cadre of students at our university to write our dissertations using personal computers (1985). You'd go to a special computer room in the library building and type away! I was advised to use Wordperfect, and I loved it. So, I learned early that the best program may get sandbagged.
posted by acrasis at 3:10 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]
posted by acrasis at 3:10 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]
Used to support a Typing Pool that were pretty committed to WordPerfect, from the DOS days (delivered to Wyse terminals from a Novell server) through to GUI hotness in WfW and then NT4. I kind of think the Novell acquisition killed it; they seemed to have a poison touch from a business perspective even if some of their products were well ahead of their time.
I stuck to ClarisWorks which did all I needed at the time even though I grew up swapping disks with Word 3 & 4 on dual-floppy Mac Plus system (system on one disk and app/files on the other, woe betide you if you needed to squeeze in a dictionary file). WordPerfect for the Mac was not a fun time. Word 5.1 was great on the Mac (if you had a HDD) but 6.0 was appalling. I always wanted to spend some time with NisusWriter which always seemed to garner rave reviews. Ended up living mostly in BBEdit as the internet age dawned and plain-text seemed to be the most useful & readily transportable file-format that could be munged around later in any word-processor or dtp app.
I recall WordPerfect popped out as a in-browser java version at one point which was pretty amazing. But java, on a Mac = painful slowness, late last century. I don't think it went anywhere other than being a technical curiosity.
posted by phigmov at 5:01 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]
I stuck to ClarisWorks which did all I needed at the time even though I grew up swapping disks with Word 3 & 4 on dual-floppy Mac Plus system (system on one disk and app/files on the other, woe betide you if you needed to squeeze in a dictionary file). WordPerfect for the Mac was not a fun time. Word 5.1 was great on the Mac (if you had a HDD) but 6.0 was appalling. I always wanted to spend some time with NisusWriter which always seemed to garner rave reviews. Ended up living mostly in BBEdit as the internet age dawned and plain-text seemed to be the most useful & readily transportable file-format that could be munged around later in any word-processor or dtp app.
I recall WordPerfect popped out as a in-browser java version at one point which was pretty amazing. But java, on a Mac = painful slowness, late last century. I don't think it went anywhere other than being a technical curiosity.
posted by phigmov at 5:01 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]
Personally, I believe most people using Word only used a *very* few features so having them on the top in a ribbon was fine. They didn't *want* to go through menus and made very few complex Docs. That and being from MS did it.
And the people I'm talking about would never drop down to the command line so html-like programing wasn't of much interest. For the Pros though...
[sigh] I suppose it came down to Power Users vs. Users.
posted by aleph at 7:40 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]
And the people I'm talking about would never drop down to the command line so html-like programing wasn't of much interest. For the Pros though...
[sigh] I suppose it came down to Power Users vs. Users.
posted by aleph at 7:40 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]
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posted by JoeXIII007 at 11:25 PM on July 5
posted by JoeXIII007 at 11:25 PM on July 5
Another reason lawyers (or, more precisely, their word processing departments) loved WordPerfect is because Reveal Codes made it easier to control all aspects of the document. I remember attorneys and their word processing operators fighting to keep an appellate brief within its fifty page, double-spaced, Times New Roman limit, and knowing once they got it safely encapsulated, it was going to stay no matter whose copy of WordPerfect you opened it on.
posted by lhauser at 4:08 PM on July 6 [2 favorites]
posted by lhauser at 4:08 PM on July 6 [2 favorites]
I took a vocational class in '96 where I learned WordPerfect and Lotus. Subsequently, every office job I ever had used Word & Excel. It wasn't that hard to make the switch but I lamented the loss of Reveal Codes for a LONG time. I haven't really thought about it in years, so I guess I got used to doing without. Mostly because I'm rarely trying to do anything fancy.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 5:11 PM on July 7 [1 favorite]
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 5:11 PM on July 7 [1 favorite]
WordPerfect (pre-Windows) was clearly the better word processor on the PC. But Microsoft Word 5 on the Mac was way better than anything else at the time
\documentclass[coldfusionmetafilter]{comment}
\usepackage{harvard,graphicx,booktabs}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\begin{document}
\section{comment}
I'm not sure I understand this dispute.
\end{document}
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:51 AM on July 8 [4 favorites]
\documentclass[coldfusionmetafilter]{comment}
\usepackage{harvard,graphicx,booktabs}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\begin{document}
\section{comment}
I'm not sure I understand this dispute.
\end{document}
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:51 AM on July 8 [4 favorites]
I used to teach classes in Word for lawyers, legal secretaries, and paralegals forced to switch from Word Perfect.
I also did this for a short time in 1999 (best-paying gig I ever did, tbh).
I learned the same thing you did: WP was what most everyone was used to. But Word also once had this nifty little feature just for WP for DOS users: you could set the screen to show the document with white text on a blue background, in an odd attempt to emulate the WP for DOS look.
posted by grubi at 6:05 AM on July 8
I also did this for a short time in 1999 (best-paying gig I ever did, tbh).
I learned the same thing you did: WP was what most everyone was used to. But Word also once had this nifty little feature just for WP for DOS users: you could set the screen to show the document with white text on a blue background, in an odd attempt to emulate the WP for DOS look.
posted by grubi at 6:05 AM on July 8
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I'm still using WP when I can get away with it. Vastly superior, in that it does only what I tell it to.
posted by Capt. Renault at 10:19 AM on July 5 [7 favorites]