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WordPerfect is an interesting example: https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/wordperfect.html

WordStar is another one, used by George RR Martin et al: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/words...



I used the TUI WordPerfect for SCO Unix/Xenix on various serial terminals and telnet/ssh connections for years. I still miss it for heads-down cranking out text.


Ah, yes. "WordPerfect 1.0 for UNIX" was the primary use of my upper school's 45 orange-plasma Wyse dumb-terminals! Not too shabby.

Sometimes a terminal would desync while you were typing up a storm, spewing control codes onto the screen. Many re-re-learned the need for frequent saves.

The WordPerfect spellchecker's short list of suggestions was typical of word processors, even decades later. A few of us knew to press the magic key to drop into a shell and use the mini's speller, which appeared to dump the whole wordlist, instantly sorted by similarity, one screen at a time. We could usually hop back into WordPerfect before anyone in charge asked why we weren't either at the system login screen or using WP. I never found another speller that worked like that.

They never did get the upgrade cards for those terminals, to turn them into smart-terminals. PC 386s with Win3.11 were the next big investment.


Available on Linux still...

https://github.com/taviso/wpunix




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