Before WordPerfect: Program Editor

Precursor to WordPerfect - Program Editor. I posted some time ago looking for a WordPerfect-like editor that pre-dated WP that I used to use. As with many things, the thought would nag me from time to time. Back in the mid/late 90's, I helped the local newspaper move articles from electronic word processing files to their webpage news section. It was tedious to say the least. As I thought of that, I could not remember the name of the program I used. I reached out to an acquaintance, who used to work with the same local paper and who helped run the dialup freenet we had at the time, to see if he could remember it. Sure enough, he remembered: Program Editor. The recalled history goes something like this: Professor at BYU creates Program Editor which then eventually becomes WordPerfect shortly afterward. When he told me this, I recalled the newspaper owner telling me that story back when he handed me the floppy disk. In fact, he would hand me a disk with the program on it plus several files with the week's news articles. I would save the text to be posted online (the exact steps elude me, but I think I used Windows 95 to run a DOS window then use copy/paste to move the text from the Editor window to a text file, then edit the text file for html to be ftp'd to the site - that might not be exactly right, I have slept a time or two since those days). In any case, I thought I would share this in case any other DOS die-hard wanted to take a trip down memory-ish lane. BTW, if parts of the history aren't quite right, feel free to add corrections below.

Decipher an unknown text file with Wintext

I had a user with a file that had a WPD extension. Normally, this would be a WordPerfect file that could easily be opened in Microsoft Office or Open Office or a myriad of other programs.  Nothing worked.  Instead, all we got was jibberish.  I even tried zamzar.com to convert it to Word, and that produced garbage.

After searching the net, I found a program called "Wintext!"  Wintext will take ANY file and extract any viable text from it.  With that program, I was able to pull out the text the user needed.

The file can be had from here:
http://www.softoxi.com/download-wintext.html