WP is and was wicked fast, and the blank screen, distraction free ui is amazing, the macro language is very powerful also.

There were law firms that used it well into the late 90s due to the amazing macros they had going. Think of the complicated Excel macros one hears about. Same thing, only with law firms and lawyers.

There are still people who run wordstar (which WP supplanted in the eighties).

I wouldn’t use it now, but is was an amazing product in its day.

Pretty sure it was used well past late 90s. At least late 2000s

still widely used in the legal world as far as I know

1st hand knowledge of contemporary usage in court offices. We still support WPD file attachments as well.

There is similar modern software as well.. no need to revert to an unmaintained program just to get something that may be a little faster than a full office suite.

No one is saying that you should. But very few word processors today are anything close to as fast. Maybe abiword. Certainly not google docs or Microsoft word.

How does open office compare?

If you want maintained, that's libreoffice. And no, LO lags on semi-modern hardware.

I haven’t used it, but unless it’s macro language is about as powerful as excel’s, and unless it has no detectable latency at all, it isn’t as good in that department at least.

it's still supported on windows

My pops won't give it up. You laugh, as you open up vim.

I still occasionally use WordPerfect on my PS/2 when I want to get serious writing done. I don't have any multitasking set up, just plain DOS, so no internet or other distractions to occupy my time.

(and even if I could multitask, I doubt a 386SX is fast enough to handle an SSL handshake these days)

What, no DESQview? Get with the times ...

There's a lot of tech nostalgia for old software. Just for fun is plenty reason enough. I also bet there are people out there who prefer it. I wonder if it is snappier than Word? I just opened MS Word on a recent Mac and it took 5-7 seconds to open to a blank document, including requiring me to choose an option and click through first. Just saying.

Try Abiword.

that's true, however you're interfering with the weekly hackernews wordperfect nostalgia thread so we're going to have to politely ask you to leave

Is this account posting output from GPT or another language model? It kind of seems like it.

Yeeaaaah, that is definitely hitting uncanny valley territory for me. Thing is, some of the comments it's making in other threads seem pretty germane, while others are really bizarre.

Is there a hacker news equivalent of the ole shoe on head test? I'm curious if there is someone adding real comments sporadically to throw folks off.

It's just ordinary newspaper-style writing in a shock jock style. (Insert stock joke about Milgram experiment.) I think it goes back to Bolshevism and especially the "talk hard" ethos of Pump Up the Volume. Hip-hop and rap are other influences.

https://archive.org/details/pump_up_the_volume_1990

Also, from an art point of view, I just like the idea of recontextualizing the computer as a device in a psychology experiment. The games you can play with this idea are pretty weird. For example: would you conduct a psychological experiment that attempts to get people better at rationalizing, and risks turning the subjects into monsters capable of rationalizing the decision to perform progressively more grotesque modifications of their body, apparently enhancing their abilities, in the style of Iron Man?

Bad bot.