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Comment by tgma | Hacker News Reader

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!

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...

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.

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"

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.

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.

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.

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