With no need for a graphical desktop at all, it will run happily in a quarter or a half a gig of memory, maybe even less. You could install a plain text-mode Linux distro such as Ubuntu Server, or 32-bit Debian, onto an old laptop and use this as the ultimate distraction-free word-processor.
Happy birthday Windows 3.1, aka 'the one that Visual Basic kept crashing on'. Microsoft reanimates 1995's 3D Movie Maker via GitHub. Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively. Unbelievably clever: Redbean 2 – a single-file web server that runs on six OSes. In fact, it's almost certainly the richest word processor for text-mode Linux that there's ever been, or ever will be. WordPerfect for Unix is a powerful, capable word-processor that doesn't need a graphical desktop. As we've written recently, a lightweight Linux distro, such as Raspberry Pi Desktop OS, or for slightly less geriatric kit, ChromeOS Flex, this could give a good use to a clapped-out laptop. On the other hand, we can just about see a use for this. WordPerfect 7 for Unix is a strange combination of some of the features of classic (that is, before PC version 5) WordPerfect, such as using F1 to mean "repeat character" and F3 for Help, and some of the version 5 features, such as drop-down menus, although oddly accessed via Esc+ = rather than Alt or F10 or any DOS-standard keystroke. That's what you are going to get if you install Ormandy's revenant 1990s application. 
Desperate users even photocopied the thing, hand-trimmed and sellotaped together the result and stuck it on. This template acted as a sort of informal copy-protection: if you didn't have one, the app was almost inoperable. It was complicated, and even experienced users often referred to a keyboard template – a piece of cardboard you placed on your keyboard, which surrounded the function keys and showed reminders of what they all did. Each key had a separate meaning on its own, or with Shift, Alt or Ctrl, and with combinations of Shift and Alt and Ctrl. Up until WordPerfect 5, the program had a very idiosyncratic user interface which made heavy use of the function keys.
WordPerfect 7 for UNIX, running perfectly happily in a Linux terminal in 2022
0 kommentar(er)
