WordPerfect 5.1 - Day Three

Well, it's day three of WP51 and I'm seeing the past as a crude stepping stone that has begun to crumble around itself. Am I doomed to recall the days of yore with my own failing memories of DOS 2.0 and higher? I fondly remember the flimsy surface of a 5.25" diskette which we used en mass as a storage medium for our documents and future memories.

I remember the day I started transferring my content from 5.25" to 3.5", and then from 3.5" to hard drive, and so on. Now we're talking Terabytes being the norm, yet it was only 15 years ago that 100 MB hard drives were the now, and Gigabytes was the nutty sounding storage size of the future.

I looked at the visit with Marilyn as a chance to revisit the "museum of the old days" and interact with it. I could still see the same woman that I knew from the past, but it was only the eyes that stayed the same, the rest had aged appropriately for being 15 years since last seeing her. I began to age sitting there. I remember feeling intimidated by her back then, I was just 24 and still perfecting my computer-self.

Her desperation to reanimate WordPerfect for DOS on her latest Pentium 4 Win XP box was of the same pursuit to find the Grail. I calmly (and not so confidently) restored the files from her dead hard drive on to the new one. At that point, the ground starting disappearing into a fog, as the strands of memory in my brain began to fail.

Then she insisted on re-installing an application named Multi-Page. A program which allows the user to produce a multi-page layout of documents printed from DOS programs. It is a task that most windows desktop publishing and word processing programs do while performing hundreds of other meaningless tasks. However in DOS, it's front and center as a challenge.

The program did install with little effort (like the old days) but then the years gap between DOS and Win XP showed itself as her external USB floppy drive was not officially recognized by DOS. It turns out that the application was written to expect a floppy controller on the motherboard in order to "see" the drive. This USB based drive was not visible to Multi-Page.

We agreed to revisit soon the options available for her some time next week, in the meantime, I set up a desktop shortcut to WP51, and made sure that the macros I wrote back in 1992 were still functioning. As I received the envelope with my payment enclosed, I looked at Marilyn's face one last time, only to get a flashback from being in the room those 15 years ago. I shudder to think about the life I've had since that time. We said goodbye and I left the house, back to the rainy night, and into my car to go home.