Office on HP-UX and Unix | Hacker News Reader

Office on HP-UX and Unix

openpa.net

102 pointsnaves54 comments

I used Applixware on Linux during college. Here's what I wrote to someone else at the time:

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I've been using Applixware 4.2 then 4.3 to write papers and such for a year and a half. Bear in mind that I've only used the Words module, not anything else.

In many ways Applixware is a superb program. Great interface, great looks, multiple-language support, including dictionaries and thesauruses (important for a Spanish major like me). The only major deficiencies are 1) inadequate filters support (Word 6/7 import and export is pretty buggy; I hear 4.4.1 will do a much better job, and handle Word97 too) and 2) missing some basic features like a simple way to do single/double spacing (you have to type in the measurements yourself).

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Another notable omission is word count; I used a macro as substitute.

Despite the flaws (4.4.1 did not fix the inability to do simple line spacing, and I was told by the company that there were no plans to change this), Applixware was good enough. I produced .rtf files that I printed via Word on campus laser printers, and .pdf files for job applications during senior year.

wow, Applixware, what a blast from the past!

I think Applixware was the corporate standard office software at Sun Micro in the late 90’s. This was during the Sun-on-Sun initiative that “banned Windows” and had all employees running Solaris on Sparcstations. There was grumbling. Sales, admin staff, basically anyone not technical, well let’s say they were not pleased.

Sun switched the standard to StarOffice around ~2000 iirc, it was a nice improvement but still not great for folks who only knew MS Office.

In the late 90s WordPerfect was also ported to Linux and there was a distro centered around having it built in. I think it was Corel Linux.

A few years ago for I'm not sure what reason (boredom?) I found those old WordPerfect binaries and ran them on recent Linux. The tricky part is that it required libc5 support. But it worked.

Apparently WordPerfect started out on Data General minicomputers.

Stuff on porting it to (modern) Linux (2022)

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_...

https://github.com/taviso/wpunix

WordPerfect was bought by Novell in 1994 and then they sold it to Corel in 1996.

Corel even released their own ARM based computer running Linux. The Netwinder.

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3288

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/50921/Corel-Netwinde...

A friend of mine got WordPerfect for SCO Unix running under Linux using the iBCS subsystem to run other x86 Unix binaries on Linux.

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

So smol. Dual NIC even!

Any other office software ported to SCO?

There are several projects which have build scripts which patch the old WordPerfect binaries to run on modern distributions, for instance:

https://github.com/taviso/wpunix

Architecturally, many Linux distributions are removing 32-bit support, so these old binaries don't have much time left.

Well 32-bit kernels yes. 32-bit binaries not so much.

Besides, it should be possible to patch them. Just append zeroes to every memory operation. Or run them within QEMU or something. This stuff is so old that any performance penalty will be unnoticeable.

> many Linux distributions are removing 32-bit support,

Are they? Fedora, sure, but they're Fedora. The only others I've seen are deprecating 32-bit host support while retaining multilib support for applications.

It's gone from rhel 10, which will cause my successor great difficulty.

I am retiring next year, and I will not be fixing this.

They'll just install Debian, probably.

"The corporate standard is rhel."

"But the engineering group uses Ubuntu extensively?"

"The corporate standard is rhel. We cannot discuss anything else."

As I am soon retiring, I won't have to watch this demolition derby.

Of course running a 32 bit binary is a different, lower effort problem than say, running on a 32-bit kernel.

For me was Corel WordPerfect the much better software the Microsoft Word. I almost forgot I ever used WordPerfect. I was much more intuitive to use.

I'd happily buy the WordPerfect suite if it were available on Linux. Corel products always worked better for me than MS.

I would kill just for the [Reveal Codes] functionality on any word processor.

I “grew up” on Worgperfect 4.2 and loved the Reveal Code feature. Always fully transparent on what was where and what it did.

That's the biggest reason i loved WP.

This article brings back fond memories of the UNIX workstation days. The first time I used Photoshop was on an SGI Indy in college. Remembering those times is like a peak into an alternate timeline where Microsoft Windows fizzled out instead of dominating the desktop market.

It was an incredible time because workstations were 10x faster than PCs with applications built very much to use specific hardware. I didn't have Photoshop on IRIX but I did have Matador and the legendary 3D stuff such as Softimage.

These dinosaur computers were the last ones that impressed mere mortals, just the box and the Trinitron screen with the SGI logo on it made people think they were in the future.

We know how that ended with Fahrenheit and other problems, but since then, very few computers have had that wow factor.

As for office, we mean MS Word and Excel, which worked brilliantly on Windows, with WordPerfect and the like lagging. For me it was no problem not having Word and Excel on IRIX as we had PCs for those things.

If I remember rightly, it was quicker to access files off the IRIX workstation SCSI disk over NFS than it was to access local files on the PC. Everything was 10x.

For Sun workstations there were the great SunPCI cards - a full x86 computer in the form of a PCI-X card. You had some USB and a VGA port if you wanted to hook up an external display, but more often you'd use the video redirection and have it displayed in a window on your desktop.

No connectors for disk drives - it'd emulate an IDE disk from file in your Solaris filesystem. So pretty much the VM experience, just in not bad.

VMWare was around since the late 90s - but at that time you typically had a computer with a single thread. If you were splurging, a system with two CPUs (two threads). Even a moderately load intensive VM would make working on the host system annoying.

Due to power and thermal constraints the hardware on there wasn't the fastest - but it was fast enough, and due to the absence of resource sharing (apart from disk bandwidth, which wasn't an issue) the overall experience was way better than using VMs.

I still have my final workstation around - a dual CPU Blade 2500 with 2 SunPCI 3 cards.

> VMWare was around since the late 90s - but at that time you typically had a computer with a single thread. If you were splurging, a system with two CPUs (two threads). Even a moderately load intensive VM would make working on the host system annoying.

VMware released their first product in May '99. Where you thinking of Wabi?

99 still counts as late 90s. I only remember that I was playing with it before 2000.

That window of time was very short: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XQRVL11sDY0

Ami Pro on OS/2 was my word processor of choice through most of high school. The intuitive layout controls and clean, focused interface spoiled me for life.

Yeah, it was a great word processor. Better than MS Word, and it had features Word still lacks like mixing styles on a single line.

What I find curious is how, as the market expanded, all these other Vendors died.

One would expect the opposite - a bigger market means more diversity. An odd thing I still don't understand.

Word docs being the medium of exchange created enough of a network effect. I remember trying to use other programs but importing/exporting to Word wasn't perfect.

Paradoxically the Internet killed the others; now printouts weren’t the standard document exchange format.

Windows 95/98 shipped with some kind of half-implemented Word, the name of which I forgot. So you could send a Word doc to anyone basically and they could read it, a great business strategy.

Fun to see Ami Pro there. I never used it on Linux, but I used on Windows, and liked it a lot more than Word and WordPerfect. I still have old files in backups with the .SAM file extensions (after Samna, the original developer).

I have used Internet Explorer 4 on Solaris 2.6 for SPARC. I don’t remember why…

The MIT Athena computer labs while I was there were 80% SPARC and 20% SGI. Despite whatever porting frameworks Microsoft had to glom on, IE for Solaris was still better than the pig Netscape was at that point.

The late 90's and early 2000's were a dark time for browsers. IE was basically the only game in town. Netscape was approaching unusable. I remember it having massive memory leaks and segfaulting every half hour or so on Solaris. Firefox wasn't out yet. Chrome was 5+ years away.

I remember this on Solaris 7! I thought it was the cutting edge of desktop computing

not only IE, but even NetMeeting, which in the late 1990s was the pinnacle of cool Microsoft. conferencing! Screen sharing! Chat!

Ostensibly based on the H323 standard, the OEM that supplied the stacks to Microsoft also rolled their own versions for Solaris, IRIX, and HPUX.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990210095918/http://www.datcon...

Fans of this may also enjoy some of NCommander's videos in YT.

Kind of ironic that the last UNIX company standing is Apple.

yes! Though IBM / AIX are still strong in a few enterprise circles. There are still some die hard IBM shops out there.

AIX was and probably still is an extremely capable OS. IBM has contributed a lot to the Linux kernel since then. Linux may be good enough now and probably a better option for many reasons for most orgs.

Google? Also apparently Microsoft.

> Google? Also apparently Microsoft.

Parent was talking about UNIX, not toys. Only MS had some UNIX (Xenix), a long time ago.

WSL2 is just as much Unix as Ubuntu on EC2 is; it just uses a hypervisor that is also a malicious Trojan.

Applixware created super clean PostScript. I used it a lot to create PS templates that my code would then merely complete.

> In 1989, Island Graphics released a "low-end" X11 office suite for Apollo workstations, called iWrite, iDraw, iPaint

I have used Ami Pro and CorelDRAW! on OS/2 but had never heard of this Island suite before, and it made me curious if these were why Apple's Pages and Numbers have such awkward terrible names:

- Island iWrite: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=74013904&caseSearchType=U...

- Island iDraw: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=74013951&caseSearchType=U...

It looks like Apple did attempt to file a US trademark for “iWrite” in 2003 which was tentatively assigned but then canceled in 2005 shortly before Pages 1.0's release:

- Apple iWrite: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=78299734&caseSearchType=U...

…but Apple's USA trademark issue seems to be failure to submit documentation about a “foreign application” they filed for the same “iWrite” in Hong Kong.

“This is in response to the Examining Attorney's September 12, 2005 Suspension Inquiry. The Examining Attorney requested that Applicant indicate the status of the foreign application. The Application had previously been suspended pending receipt of a copy of the foreign registration certificate under 44(e). The foreign application has been advertised but has not yet matured to registration. Applicant therefore requests that the Application be put back into suspension pending the registration of the foreign application.”

“Section 44(e) Based on Foreign Registration: Applicant has a bona fide intention to use the mark in commerce on or in connection with the identified goods and /or services, and submits a copy of [ Hong Kong registration number B1127/2005 registered 03/13/2003 ]”.

I looked that up (HK 2005B01127) and it is an active HK trademark filed by Apple which is valid through 2030: https://esearch.ipd.gov.hk/nis-pos-view/#/tm/details/view/78...

So nothing to do with Island's iWrite at all and sorry that this comment is now mildly off-topic. My complete speculation is that Apple didn't want to wait for this to get sorted out and delay the release of Pages any longer w/r/t Microsoft's Office 2004 being one of last remaining elements of control MS could exert on 2000s Apple v(._. )v

Cool history; thanks for posting!

Thanks a lot for going through this rabbit hole for all of us. Comments like this is why I am here every day!

Site mentioned Lotus 1-2-3 on a couple unixes, but not SunOS

It was definitely on SunOS, I installed it for several customers.

For a while MSFT had a port of Internet Explorer for Solaris and HP-UX (this was a quarter century ago!).

Internet Explorer was originally based on the NCSA Mosaic browser, which had ports for major UNIX platforms.

Indirectly. IE was based on Spyglass Mosaic, which was a licensee of NCSA Mosaic. However, Spyglass had rewritten it to deal with the substantial differences between the Mac, Windows and X11 ports, so even early versions of IE aren't directly descended. Microsoft eventually removed Spyglass' copyright message around IE 7, suggesting no Mosaic code persisted by then.

Wasn't there StarOffice?

This was maybe, 1993, I remember my step dad bought a photo copy machine and had us photo copy manuals for software he had bought and was planning to return?

Some of these boxes look familiar.

The CorelDRAW manual was a beast. Took forever.

My office used WordPerfect on HPUX in the 1990s

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