And now for a walk down low-on-memory lane.

No doubt a few people have tried this-- test if some ancient 16bit Windows 3.1 based app will run under XP.  I'd done it already, with a small applet called Windows Cardfile, one of those accessories from the days of Win 3.x.  No big deal here; feature wise; Cardfile seems about as complex as Notepad-- and both will probably run, even if everything else is melting down and Windows is about to shoot itself. :)

But this time I wanted to see if Word Perfect 6.0 would install and run under WinXP.  It did both, surprisingly well, and much much faster than in days of old.

By the way, I took a bunch of screen shots of the various dialogs brought up by the Word Perfect 6 installer.  Click here if you want to see them.  Be warned that all the images are placed together and none have been downsized, so the page might be slow to load, depending on your connection.

If you can't get Word Perfect 6 to work with XP and you need to open your old Word Perfect documents, Microsoft's free Word Viewer 2003 might be the solution.  You can't edit files with the Viewer but you can make print-outs or copy the contents to some other application.

I remember when I'd have to install WP on Win3.1 and Win95.  I had to use floppies, 13 of them I think, and it took so very long.  Nothing to do but stare at the screen and watch the Word Perfect billboards slowly change…. while my floppy went "neeee ahhhhh eeee, neeee ahhhhh eeee, neeeeeeeeeahhhhhhhhh… " and so on and so forth, until it was time to plunk in another floppy and hear the tune again.

Contrast that with more recent times.  Late in 2001, I took nearly everything I had stored on diskettes and moved it to CD-R-- just one CD-R, mind you-- and I didn't even come close to filling it up.  Anyway, Word Perfect 6.0 was one of the applications I copied over.  For convenience, I recently copied the contents from a later version of that CD onto a second hard drive, so I wouldn't have to go poking around for a CD if I needed some file or program or other.

So to get back to the point, I decided to see if old Word Perfect 6.0 (released October 1993) would live or die under XP.  One thing that made me unsure was WP 6.0's complexity compared to other programs I've known... Lots of whats and whatnots to think about, where best to store files so as to keep WP as isolated from XP as possible, what XP laws might get broken despite the care I was taking, would Word Perfect keep its grubby unwashed 16bit paws off the system32 folder, would the installer even run or would it give some arcane error that I wouldn't know how to handle, would WP even launch at the end of it all, were all the install files intact from all that copying from floppies to CD to CD to shining CD?

The whole process, including the part where you choose your components and make other custom settings, couldn't have taken more than a minute and a half, though I didn't time anything.  The installation stage took less than 15 seconds, I'd bet on that.  There was no time to look at the billboards… they just flew by while the progress thermometers sped along like one of those Japanese bullet trains.  THIS is what I call progress!  From 1994 to 2001, I had two basic hardware setups, the first a 386, the second a Pentium 120.  This PII which I'm still using, seems light years faster than those older heaps.  Still I can imagine how a WP6 install would go with XP on a P4 with a serial ATA drive.

It says something for XP too, Word Perfect as well, that an old 16-bit word processor that once installed from a bunch of floppies, will do likewise from an IDE hard drive and a much newer OS.

Trouble is, the whole thing was an exercise and little else.  Word Perfect 6.0 was pretty advanced for its time... it had right-click context menus for one thing-- if I'm not mistaken, MS Word didn't have those back then-- and for sure, Windows itself didn't have them.  Still I can't think of a good reason to start using WP6 again; Word 2000 is quite capable and then some.  What's more, WP6 doesn't know beans about long filenames, and I don't care to deal with the short ones anymore.

When it came time to uninstall WP6, I was reminded of another inconvenience-- no modern way to remove everything, at least not modern enough for me.  I decided just to delete manually.  Mostly this meant deleting WP's folders.  Word Perfect had also put a printer driver in the system32 directory and a couple of files in the Windows directory, plus it made changes to win.ini.  WP also added a few extra file types which I removed using My Computer / Tools / Folder Options / File Types.  I suppose a script could be written to handle all this but that somehow seems a bigger waste of time than playing around with an old word processor on a new OS.