[Long] [OT] That Big Shadow Over Your Shoulder, Part 1, wasRe: [Coco] OS Vulnerabilities

[Neil Morrison]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dennis Bathory-Kitsz" <bathory at maltedmedia.com>
...

> At 10:04 PM 2/28/04 -0800, Neil Morrison wrote:
> >IMO, Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS is much more of a standard. A very
> >large number of programs can handle that format, and there was
once a
> >Unix version. Even MS Word can read/write it.
>
> WordPerfect? DOS? Well, that's just kind of retro. :) But we're a
retro
> group, aren't we?
>
...
> But back to your specific comment: As a writer, I would never dream
of
> handing a WordPerfect DOS document to a business round-robin
discussion or
> shared edit or editor or publisher. I wouldn't do it because it's
not used
> and, more important to me, because I'd lose the account since I
wouldn't be
> perceived as up to speed with business technology. Even with
everyday users
> -- who were not there during the computer rev-o-lu-tion of the
1970s/80s --
> a WordPerfect DOS document would be utterly useless, and an
embarrassment
> to them because I'd be shoving the appearance of geekdom in their
faces.
...

Don't get me wrong. I use MS Word exclusively and that includes hard
core VBA programming. I was just observing that I perceive that a
remarkable number of other programs can at least read Word Perfect
5.1 for DOS, and most can write it, and MS Word can still open WP51
to this day.

MS peddles RTF as the universal format, but I'm not aware of many
non-MS programs that can handle that either.

For archival purposes WP51 is a good possibility, although perhaps
HTML is now more universal.

Neil