The mystery (and tragedy) of a post-1.01 WordPerfect

A story in four disk labels:



Some questions:

• Did vanilla WordPerfect 1.01 have problems running on NextStep 3.0?
• Do the files on these disks contain a post-1.01 patch, despite their identical version number?

Now for the bad news:



Disks 1 and 2 are totally borked.  Flux dumps, even with 8 revs, show all bad sectors.  I've validated this on "real" hardware (a PLI SuperFloppy hooked up to Cube over SCSI) -- the Workspace Manager declares these two disks to be unformatted. (I'm happy to share the captured flux with other members more knowledgeable than myself -- or even to send the disks to someone who would like to try more heroic recovery measures.)

As disk four contains only the Reference package, the only interesting part is probably the partial "Chunked" file on Disk 3, an artifact of the ChunkPackage (https://www.nextcomputers.org/files/manuals/nd/Concepts/Installer.htmld/index.html) utility. It's attached here, with a spurious .txt extension the forum requires that should be removed, leaving the final filename WordPerfect.tar.Z.3.  Any investigation would be welcome -- perhaps this can be Frankensteined together with the regular 1.01 chunks, to see if there's any way of extracting it?

Just a pointer to some floppy images:

https://fsck.technology/software/NeXT/NeXTSTEP%20Applications/WordPerfect%20NeXTSTEP/ (https://fsck.technology/software/NeXT/NeXTSTEP%20Applications/WordPerfect%20NeXTSTEP/)

Well, let's look at some numbers...

The file posted is 747439 bytes and the label says it was dated Sep 25 1992.

WordPerfect 1.0's WordPerfect_1.tar.Z.3 is 839413 bytes. Its files are dated Jan 14 1991.

WordPerfect 1.0.1's WordPerfect.tar.Z.3 is 1126400 bytes. Its files are dated Jun 15 1993. Also, it is the middle floppy of a set of five. (Disk 6 contains the Reference content.)

So it seems what you have (had) there is actually a beta, and it was closer in time (and file size) to 1.0 than 1.0.1, despite the confusing "still called 1.0.1" text. My guess is that it's the second prerelease of a product that was still a long way off.

NS3.0 was a big shift for a lot of software. All versions of 3.x shipped with a "/NextDeveloper/2.0CompatibleHeaders" directory (albeit on the developer CD starting in 3.1) to be used for upgrading software.

I recently read that TOPDRAW users complained that it couldn't run under 3.0 (probably the major reason it disappears from the fossil record in late 1992), apparently because the fonts directory had been moved. Since WP is, after all, a word processor, I expect it cared just as intensely as TOPDRAW did about fonts and would have been affected in precisely the same way, but as the Usenet post I read mentioned a workaround involving some well-placed symlinks, it probably didn't take the programmers at WordPerfect, Inc. very long to patch for 3.0. (TOPDRAW users were not so lucky—their program was acquired by Appsoft just prior to its 2.0 release, which never came out.)

Huh, I think you're right... did WP 1.0 ship on four disks (three main disks and a reference?)

Quote from: pl212 on July 27, 2025, 10:43:26 PMHuh, I think you're right... did WP 1.0 ship on four disks (three main disks and a reference?)

Yes, but as noted above, the third disk archive was bigger than this version, which seems pretty counter-intuitive. I don't know of any reason why a port from NS 2.x to NS 3.x would make a program shrink by almost 100 KB. Maybe they'd removed some features that they planned on rewriting before the final release.