Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died | Hacker News Reader

Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died

heraldextra.com

292 pointsrazin81 comments

This makes me sadder than I thought it would.

My first computer [1] didn't have Microsoft Word on it, but it had WordPerfect installed with the OEM Windows. I've always had really horrid handwriting so I preferred to type out all my homework since I was twelve or so, so I had to use whatever I could to do so, and WordPerfect was there.

I grew to actually really like it, and I used it for about two years until my hard drive crashed, I had to reinstall Windows, and then I installed StarOffice (which Google was giving away for free from Google Pack or something like that).

Still, I liked WordPerfect, and looking at the history it seems like it was actually quite significant; a part of me feels like it should have been the de facto word processor instead of Word.

[1] Not counting the hand me down Commodore 64 I got as a pretty young kid.

I somehow memorized most of the function key combos for wordperfect when in high school. And it wasn't like I was doing loads of reports for school. I guess it was a combination of there not being much else to do with the PC I had than playing the few (copied) games I had and fiddling with my copy of Wordperfect 5.1 (my neighbor who taught using it, supplied it). In any case, bored as I was, I explored a lot of the feature set and wrapped my head around features I would never use. Like creating mailings. I don't think I've ever actually had to create one. But it was there so I dove into it. For the post-internet generation, this is how you would create snail mail spam campaign in the early nineties. Merge a list of addressees with a letter with the right codes and then print personalized letters.

I also had a hand me down commodore 64 before that. My uncle donated this when he got his first PC. I taught myself basic on that. And with a few peeks and pokes managed a simple game even. Alas, I had no disk drive and never thought to actually save my creations anywhere. Like on the tape drive I did have. The commodore 64 was great though. And my uncle bundled some introductory computer science stuff with it (a primer on bits and bytes) that along with the excellent C64 manual went a long way to got me into programming. My local library was useless. I had no access to information. There was no internet (at least not accessible to me; I had not even heard of it). But that C64 manual got me curious and I had nothing better to do. I did not realize it at the time but that bit of commodore 64 documentation and computer science intro is what changed my life.

The PC I got after that was relatively boring because it did not include anything useful in terms of documentation. Starved of information, I dove into Wordperfect.

I probably would have done my homework on the C64 in the late 90's, where doing something like that on the C64 would still kind of be a viable thing (barely), but my dad didn't have the printer for it anymore. My parents had a computer and I did use it but mostly to play Descent.

Once I got my own computer I started doing everything on it, primarily because teachers genuinely could not read my handwriting. This sometimes required me to retype the worksheets in some capacity, but fortunately my teachers never had a problem with me doing that (maybe because they knew the alternative would be an unreadable mess). I learned algebra and calculus via the use of MathType (which Florida's online school gave a free license and I took one class virtually), and it's to a point now where I can almost never find a pen when I need one because I type everything out, since I haven't really practiced writing with by hand for about twenty years. I genuinely get kind of uncomfortable doing any kind of math with pen and paper now, since I'm so used to MathType and now LaTeX.

I never did a depth-first analysis of the features of WordPerfect, just the superficial stuff to make basic documents, but I did like using it. I don't remember any of the keystrokes anymore, but I did learn them when I was first using it.

My highschool teacher in 2008 taught us how to use the "mail merge" feature in Word. Out of the whole class it was the most "advanced" feature we learned and I wondered if I would ever use it in reality. Nope. Good to know it was outdated in the 90s

Sorry to be very selfish. but reading your story gave me a sad flashback. I also had a similar problem writing. And I also learnt typing and LaTeX by the time I was 11. However, teachers refused to accept "computer-generated" homework saying you don't learn without writing by hand. And I was condemned to a stressful childhood.

I'm jealous; I didn't know LaTeX existed when I was 11; my dad probably did but he was pretty firmly in the WYSIWYG camp and didn't feel compelled to tell me about it (which, you know, fair enough, I was 11).

Yeah, usually what would happen is I'd turn in 3-4 assignments with my handwriting, my teachers would see that it's completely illegible, they'd ask me about it, and in that conversation I would say "if you want I'm happy enough to type it out". To be clear, my handwriting is really, really, bad, I usually can't even read it myself. It was slightly better in high school since I was writing more often but the teachers really would have trouble. Usually for tests where I had to do things with a pen and paper, I would do my work with my illegible stuff, then very very slowly and painstakingly write the final answer as clean as I could and then circle it.

I guess I got lucky with having some teachers that were OK with it. A part of me kind of feels like I should have just worked on my penmanship but I genuinely do think that there are a lot of advantages to doing math with TeX or MathType. One thing I really like is that since copying takes no effort, there's no reason to not show every step, no matter how insignificant. I think my teachers appreciated that too; when I would make a mistake, it was never ambiguous to where the mistake happened because every step was displayed.

The WordPerfect story as told by an early executive, Pete Peterson:

http://www.wordplace.com/ap/almostperfect.pdf

The things that were possible in 1980, when you could work mornings in a grocery store making FOUR dollars an hour, covering your house payment (with a large garden!) because your drapery business is failing.

Partially because where WP set up shop, the Utah Valley in the 1980s, was mostly still a rural county with a barely-semi-urban exclave at the middle. Living in the center of Provo let you pretend to be surrounded by actual development while you worked or got your Psych degree, but WordPerfect was building itself on top of apple orchards and alfalfa fields once they went a few miles outside in any direction. The land was much, much cheaper, and the old steelworkers' not-even-ramblers much smaller, than even the neighboring Salt Lake Valley a few tens of miles to the north, which by now had a mostly-developed mix despite being more than a little larger, let alone any of the actually urban metro areas high tech businesses usually tend to spring up in.

Nowadays, though, the place is pretty much built out, and the land prices have spiked accordingly since most of the nearby areas are BLM land. Don't expect a next WordPerfect any time soon.

I was around back in the mid ‘80s and don’t recall my $4/hour PT job being able to be stretched that far. Especially when mortgage rates in the early ‘80s were bouncing around 10-12%.

They weren't possible. A quick Google says that median US home price in 1980 was $64k, and the average mortgage interest was 13.7%[1]. Plugging that into a loan calculator, assuming a 20% down payment and 30 year term, and I get a $600/month payment, almost the entirety of that worker's full time $4/hr salary.

Either the numbers here are spun or Orem was extraordinarily cheap.

[1] This was right in the middle of the inflation crisis!

The author did admit that their salary almost covered their house payment, but didn't include any other expenses. And if they bought a few years ago before interest/inflation rates spiked, it's a more viable story.

As other commenters have noted, "median US home price" is not a relevant measure here, where their location would have much-lower-than-median prices.

> "median US home price" is not a relevant measure here

It certainly seems relevant to the discussion of "The things that were possible in 1980". Yes, it was possible to live more cheaply in the uninhabited exurbs of Utah in 1980. It's possible to do so in 2024 too!

Upthread commenter was clearly evoking the idea of the US economy for low wage workers having gotten "worse" in the last 40 years. Something that's (1) clearly not true in general given the data and (2) not even true in the specific situation evoked.

I've never heard someone disagree with the obvious and universal concept that low wage workers prospects in the US being are a steep and multi-decade decline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...

I knew an old guy who worked at Wordperfect, he absolutely hated Pete Peterson with passion. From what he told me, Pete would be exactly the kind of guy that would insist on an Return to Office police just because if you are not suffering, you're not giving us back all we pay you.

vi/vim users everywhere gonna love this one:

"He also eliminated the different typing modes which plagued the early word processors. With other products, if you were typing new text at the end of a document, you had to be in a Create mode. If you typed in the middle, you had to be in an Edit mode. In an Edit mode, your typing would erase existing text, so to insert text, you had to change to an Insert mode. Alan allowed the user to type anywhere in the document without a mode change"

If it worked at s-expression level rather than character level, it would make total sense! Editing and inserting are different phases.

And of course it's trendy writers' advice today to do not mix writing with editing. Create vs. Edit mode embodied that before it was popular.

I use neovim, but I actually really prefer the Wordstar-like editing model (same/similar to Word Perfect's?).

You'd think that would push me towards emacs, but I just get the sense that neovim has a more active community.

Emacs is probably more active than ever.

But it's a whole thing. Ends up being a whole all-encompassing world view. It's my preferred editor, and I love and have memorized the default key bindings and window management years ago... but I also ... have a love hate thing with it. Something always needs tweaking and it takes so long to start.

This one and Sid Meier's "Memoir!" are two of my favourite software dev stories. Both are quick easy reads / and from the same era... code-nostalgia and hard- business mixed together.

"The Autodesk File Bits of History, Words of Experience":

https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/

The Network Revolution – confessions of a computer scientist (1982) <https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC>

This was a great story, I really enjoyed reading about it.

How else would I have shrunk 12 pages of high-school physics notes to fit on the allowed 3x5" (76x127mm) index card with 0.1 pt font printed in raster mode at 600 dpi on an HP LaserJet 4? WP 5.2 for DOS. IIRC, Word for Windows at the time was inflexible in granularity of TrueType font sizes.

.1 pt? Did they allow a magnifying glass for the test?

No, but I had really good vision then and could see it by squinting and using the pinhole camera trick. In the end, the exhaustive preparation made the difference. It might as well have been open book because it was a damn hard test that relied on first principles and problem-solving rather than anything that was memorizable. It was relatively harder than the SAT-I but wasn't outdone by either an abstract mathematics or modern physics for physicists & engineers finals in college. I now wonder about the utility of academic hazing rituals, if it wasn't just a formulaic cash-grab and elitism demand rather than a meaningful attempt at knowledge or process indoctrination.

Late 80's: WP's 'Reveal Codes' helped me whip up some code that imported our application's screen definitions so I could use them directly in a specification document, impressing our customer. WP was an elegant weapon in a more civilized age.

Sometime in '85, my mom is an administrative assistant at the local University. She's an absolute wiz on her office's newly modernized setup with these "PC" things running Wordperfect all creating beautiful documents on nascent HP laser printers. She'd let me show up after hours to hunt'n'peck the final draft of my high school term papers on the setup. I knew so little about computers then, but i firmly believe the magic of this simple process and things like "reveal codes" planted the seeds for finding deeper insights into speedy software on slow hardware and how file formats work. She was so sad when it inevitably went to windows :-) Rest in peace Bruce, thank you for .. you.

The comments here focus on WordPerfect, reveal codes, etc, as is natural for a tech site.

But what struck me reading this obituary is that he was a graduate of Brigham Young University, lived in Utah, and was a strong LGTBQ+ advocate, appearing to be a member of that community himself. I can't imagine that was easy, especially in the past (googling shows it is still condemned by the LDS church today) and he seems to have tackled it through very strong philanthropy and support.

Kudos. Kindness and support for those who need it is a greater legacy than any technology.

Bruce came into the world and made it a better place. Bruce was smart, kind, thoughtful, and generous. I have never met him personally, but early in my life, his story had a significant positive impact on my life. Like him, I too grew up in Twin Falls, Idaho. It’s a conservative state in an LDS Religious stronghold. My high school technology teacher (Mike) was married to his sister at the time and spoke fondly of him but more importantly, spoke specifically about who Bruce was. In hindsight, he knew I needed to hear it.

I wasn’t out as gay yet, maybe only 15 years old. Of course, it would have been a death sentence for a teenager in Southern Idaho to come out as gay. One day though, Mike told me “You know, you can grow up here and you can be /different/ in many different kinds of ways, you can be a band nerd, a guy who writes software, you can be gay, you can be /yourself/ and no matter what some adults might tell you right now, you will be okay. Not only okay, but you can live a fulfilled and successful life while being authentic and true to yourself. You are never the person that these adults claim you are. They don’t know anything.“ He then went on to tell me Bruce’s story and how in his opinion, of course, Bruce wasn’t “evil” or “wrong” for being gay.

In 2005, I wrote my technology teacher a personal thank you letter. I wrote one to Bruce as well and I asked if it could be shared with him.

Bruce took the time to respond:

  Dear Brian,
  Thank you for taking the time to write your letter.  I was very moved by your story.  There were parts that really reminded me of some of my own experiences in life.
  The beautiful thing about life, at least as I have seen it, is that if you keep trying and never doubt yourself, you really can make amazing things happen both in yourself and in the world around you.  I am sure you too have already touched many people around you and have been a positive influence for them. That's so very important.  You may never realize the good you are doing, but it is happening.
  Being gay is becoming more and more accepted as "normal" and one day maybe it just won't matter.  As for being a geek, I don't consider that a bad term.  The world needs geeks.  But then they need gays too!
  Thanks again,
  Bruce Bastian

So long, and thanks for Reveal Codes.

For those who weren't there at the time:

Imagine that all web editors emitted a proprietary document format that wasn't documented anywhere except in the editor that wrote a file and the viewer that interpreted it. You lived with this because that's just the way it was done. It was common to get a web page into such a state that 2/3 of the page was red, one column was RTL for some reason, and everything was in italics except for the 1 word you wanted to be that way.

You were used to this. It wasn't great, but that's life.

And then someone released a web editor with a "reveal HTML" setting that suddenly showed you that `<font color="red">` tag that messed everything up and allowed you to delete it.

That's what Reveal Codes did for us. It was a revelation.

Yep. It's just like a right-click "View Page Source" function in a browser, except: A person can use it to perform modifications.

Everything in WordPerfect was just markup, and it was editable markup at that.

When I first saw HTML I grasped it instantly, realising it was just WP "reveal codes" you could write.

Surprising really that there really isn't a word processor that basically uses HTML.

That might look a lot like Markdown.

ALT F3, my dear incredibly powerful friend. There wasn't a jam you couldn't get out of once the magic codes behind the curtain were revealed.

The "Reveal Codes" is a good idea. WYSIWYG without Reveal Codes is no good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Bastian

Related (from Wikipedia references):

https://www.deseret.com/utah/2024/06/17/word-perfect-co-foun...

https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/bruce-bastian-co-fo...

https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-mou...

The legacy.com link lists cause of death as pulmonary fibrosis.

https://www.legacy.com/news/celebrity-deaths/bruce-bastian-1...

WordPerfect is still being sold. Lawyers used to love it, but I think they’ve mostly moved on to Word now. So who’s still buying new licenses for WP in 2024?

I still use WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24413394

I'm having flashbacks to the late 90s for some reason, WordPerfect was briefly popular on Linux, before StarOffice, OpenOffice, etc., when Corel Linux shipped with it.

I don't remember why I did this, but some time in the last decade I found one of those old binaries and ran it. It was annoying to get a libc5 binary to run on a recent distro. But it worked.

They haven't released a new version since 2021 so I am guessing hardly anyone is still buying WordPerfect. I'm guessing that like Winzip (which they also own) it is just going on fumes now while the company that owns it is focusing on other products.

Some authors still used it too

The goto office package during MSDOS time period - First WordStar then Multimate and then WordPerfect.

Famous for supporting every printer manufactured on planet Earth - 3 disks of printer drivers.

Afaik it was written in assembler hence the tough time when they needed to move to more modern OS/2 with Presentation Manager and then later Windows 3.

You could download zillions more from their BBS, especially when new printers came out. That list was seemingly endless.

Also, when they supported video cards for print preview, similarly they had extensive support.

WordPerfect really was an outstanding word processor. Reveal codes (like many others here have pointed out) made "debuging" formatting issues relatively painless as was the "make it fit to a certain layout or size" feature. In an era when you didn't really have WYSIWYG they did an excellent job of enabling users to more or less get nice looking output without having to go to TeX.

I remember it took a LONG time before there was a Windows version of WordPerfect which I think took a lot of their momentum away. Combine that with Microsoft basically giving away Office or bundling Word+Excel they succeeded in eroding market share from Lotus / WordPerfect.

I think the Lotus Suite may have even pre-dated MSFT Office as a suite (not 100% certain) and as usual functionality was often superior or better implemented than MSFT's.

Credit should also go to WordPerfect for making a Linux version in the 2000's before Linux desktop was as mature as it is today. Sadly they didn't continue this effort.

I'm glad we have LibreOffice but it's frankly a clone of MSFT Office, the UI is very cluttered and it has the same "weirdisms" that Office has.

The thing that got me was I used to use the second to last version of WordStar. Which had paragraph and page styles that you could import, edit and apply to text. When it became apparent that I couldn't be using Word Star to share documents anymore I tried WordPerfect and it was so annoying. You just want to set the paragraph style and start typing not play with tags. Eventually I just used Word. But styles in word wasn't nearly as obvious and straight foreword.

Lotus Smartsuite came in 1992 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_SmartSuite .

Microsoft Office for Mac arrived in 1989, the Windows version came in 1990. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_office

WordPerfect 5.x, running on DOS, is/was the best work processor ever. WordPerfect indeed.

that's my experience as well

Back in the late 80's I was feeling the kind of the world editing documents WYSIWYG with some Desktop Publishing package on my Atari ST, while my friends toiled away in the stone age of PC text mode with WordPerfect and that incredibly weird and primitive thing (to me): reveal codes.

By the time I moved to PCs I could use Windows 3.x and MS Word, so I lived through college in the late 80s and early 90s without ever using WP. But I still learned to understand the meaning, reason and power of reveal codes.

Funny you should mention the Atari ST. I heard WordPerfect did make it to the platform, but only for a short time. I wonder if it was any good?

I used WordPerfect for the Amiga. I was in high school, so I didn't use any features beyond what you'd need for an essay or report - it seemed equivalent to the equivalent DOS version (4.x) from this perspective.

One of the challenges I had was printing french accented characters on a LaserJet+ clone - an issue I never resolved, and didn't encounter in the DOS version on my parent's PC.

It's truly a darn shame that the piracy situation was so rampant on both the ST and Amiga platforms. It's pretty much the main reason why WordPerfect (and a variety of other software) was pulled from the market, in favor of the PC and Mac markets.

WordPerfect was even available on the Apple II!

On a podcast series covering some of the history of the intersection of business and technology in Utah (The 4th Node), the hosts had an episode with Bruce Bastian. Covers his background and the history of WordPerfect, for those curious to learn more and/or hear from Bruce himself:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1z0AEyFvPN30WFbQc317T6

I know lawyers (who do a lot of very particular word processing) who kept using WordPerfect for decades after Microsoft Word had become the norm.

My understanding was that a lot of courtroom document standards originated as "...like WordPerfect does it." For example, before word processing, no one expected documents to include word counts. When word processing came along, judges wanted to know much much they were going to be expected to read, so they started requiring the cover sheet to include the number of words. And because WP came along at the right time, its algorithm for counting words (do you include footnotes? Headers/footers? The word "page" on "page 23"? Section titles?) became the de facto way to do it, and judges being judges, some were persnickety about the numbers matching exactly and would throw a hissy if they didn't.

Here's an example of someone bumping against that: https://www.wpuniverse.com/vb/forum/wordperfect/troubleshoot...

> I know lawyers

Sorry, man.

---

But does that mean you have some good lawyer jokes to share?

Why don't sharks bite lawyers?

Professional courtesy.

(I have a million of these from my lawyer friends.)

Please, keep `em coming!

What's the difference between a catfish and a lawyer?

One's a scum sucking bottom dweller and the other's a fish.

(Stopping with this one. It's fun trading these with attorney buddies but I don't want someone to take them out of context as an opportunity to start lawyer bashing.)

I lived in Provo for 17 years and the legacy of WordPerfect was still in the air - not to mention the development and gardens at Thanksgiving Point which was an Ashton project, IIUC.

Anyway, I wasn't aware of Bruce Bastian specifically but the Mormon/LGBT angle stands out. It must have taken a lot of character to be out so publicly in that community.

(The LDS church's response to legalization of gay marriage was to excommunicate anyone who got married to someone of the same sex, and to bar their children from baptism and advancement unless they disavowed their parents' relationship. The policy was rescinded in 2019. In earlier times one could get excommunicated simply for _being_ gay.)

It looks like Bruce and his husband made some appearances on Mormon Stories podcast if you want some inside baseball: https://www.mormonstories.org/?s=bruce+bastian

Brings back so many memories. WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Novell, and Wang Computers. So long, Mr Bastian, and thank you

And Lotus 1-2-3, SuperCalc, dBase, and R:Base.

I met one of the Lotus cofounders on a group bicycling vacation tour in Europe. While legally blind at the time, he had a strategy for participating without crashing into anyone else.

WordPerfect was my perfect electric typewriter experience. It struck a nerve for me.

I had an old, bulky laptop, Windows 3.11, and then WordPerfect 6. Of course, everything had to be installed from disk.

This was my technically totally limited writing setup, however I was very productive with it and enjoyed the setup.

Even on Windows 95, WordPerfect was my tool of choice. MS Word overtook only because WP crashed too often and the beneficial Grammar tool was lagging behind.

I felt sad the moment I had to let go of WP. Even thinking about it today feels crazy. I never ever again felt an emotional rift after switching to another tool. It was only this one time with WP.

I think Corel bought WP and somewhat tried to revive WP, but this came too late.

WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS paired with a model F XT or AT layout (function keys on the side) keyboard has a special place in my heart. That combination along with a copious amount of weed got me through a lot of college papers in the late 80s.

In the 1990s I loved the macro feature of WP 5.1. Macros and Reveal Codes let me write a basic Emacs keyboard emulator to accommodate my fingers' muscle memory.

When Windows got to be a thing, my law firm considered switching to WP for Windows because WP 5.1 for DOS was the unquestioned industry standard for lawyers. But we surveyed our clients (almost all of them were big companies) and learned that they were going over to Word for Windows. So we said, "who gives a [hoot] what other law firms are using" and switched to Word for Windows. It was more than a bit of a downgrade from WP 5.1 in DOS

RIP. Expertise in wordperfect was what allowed me to grok emacs and latex during college and post-grad work. In working life, I was forced to shift to vim, when I found emacs unavailable by default on many unix boxen.

Your changes have been saved, Bruce. RIP

Brings back great memories of laying out WordPerfect keyboard overlays at my University Computer Lab job back in the day. And helping students to Bold (F6) and Underline (F8) their documents.

Good times. http://xahlee.info/kbd/wordperfect_shortcuts_strip.html

I've never really seen Word as anything other than inferior, having cut my teeth on WordPerfect.

Others have posted their favorite shortcuts (and Reveal Codes truly was magical); my most used ones I haven't seen mentioned were Ctrl+Shift+F1 and Alt+Shift+F1. IIRC, those were spell check and thesaurus, respectively.

RIP Bruce, you made the world a better place for millions.

Reveal codes was useful. The loss of screen realestate to the hint bar was sometimes annoying.

I preferred runoff/[t]roff and vi

Word perfect was the best - Reveal Codes - was my ninja tool for making thing format just right.

F10, F7

I changed the url from https://www.wsj.com/tech/bruce-bastian-wordperfect-lgbtq-act... because that one doesn't appear to have any paywall workaround.

It does appear to be a better article though, so if someone finds a link that people can actually read, we can swap it back.

Here is a free link https://www.wsj.com/tech/bruce-bastian-wordperfect-lgbtq-act..., although I'm not sure how many clicks it will support, but here it is anyway.

Black Bar?

(Emailed as well.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com