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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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