Many many years ago, I was involved with the Perfect Writer software product from Perfect Software. This was a word processor for CP/M and MS-DOS (pre-windows) machines.
You can download a copy for CP/M here. As further aside, Perfect Writer itself would not have been possible without Mince and Scribble from Mark of the Unicorn, which was in turn dependent on the excellent BDS C compiler from Leor Zolman. Thanks, Leor!
Sometimes people ask if they can “recover” old Perfect Writer files.
> Barry Dobyns,
> Hello
> Thanks for having your resume' on line (Impressive, by the way). I
> have encountered an interesting challenge. A man here in San Antonio
> stopped by today to buy at an older "486" I reformatted and loaded w/
> Windows 98 SE. An excellent writer of Spanish poetry & short "human
> interest" stories; he relates that he wrote a volume of original pieces
> in "Perfect Writer" on an old "286" (which died on him), using the old
> 5 1/2" floppies to store it. Now he is searching for a way to read and
> convert to Corel Word Perfect, or to MS Word/ Winword. Finding a 5
> 1/2" Floppy Drive, is my first challenge. 2nd would be being sure that
> it would be compatible with the 486.
>
> My question then would be; is it even possible to attempt? (providing
> of course, that the discs have not been damaged or data corrupted, and
> I can obtain a 5 1/2" drive) Or will he be limited to finding an older
> used computer w/ CP/M? Any information would be greatly appreciated.
> Thank you.
> Cordially,
> ...
Perfect Writer files are plain text files – so no special translator program is necessary. The formatting commands appear as plain text embedded in the document as well. Here’s what I’d recommend as a plan of action:
1) Find a 5 1/2″ drive to read the floppies (if they are ms-dos floppies). You probably already identified this as the first step. Happily, nearly any 486/pentium (1,2,3,4) is still compatible with 5 1/2″ drives, if you can find one. I’ve got one on one of my PIII machines in the basement. I keep moving the same old disk drive over (it started on a 286, i think) to new machines when I upgrade. Change the bios setup to tell it you’ve got a 1.2M 5 1/2″ instead of a 1.44M 3.5″. And write protect them before you start – you don’t want to erase one by accident.
If the floppies are CP/M ones, you may want to try and use xenocopy which can read many CP/M floppies on your PC.
2) then depending on whether your friend included formatting commands in his masterpieces or not you have a some choices. Formatting commands in Perfect Writer look a
little bit like HTML (although it pre-dates it by more than a decade). They’re always an @ sign followed by a command word, and then the target enclosed in delimiters. For example in HTML you would say <i>yikes</i> to italicize, in Perfect Writer you would say @i(yikes) or perhaps @begin(i)yikes@end(i)
3) If there’s no formatting included in his masterpieces, then you’re nearly done. Copy the files off the old floppies onto new 3.5″ ones, and rename them all to .TXT files. you can open them in any word processor and be happy.
4) If there’s embedded formatting then you can rename them to .txt and leave the formatting in, and let your associate open them in a word processor and then fix up the formatting himself.
5) If you want to preserve the formatting my recommendation is to convert it to HTML. You can either do this manually in a text editor (even Notepad is sufficient), or with an automated program. You’ll have to write the program yourself. I did this myself once many years ago for some old documents of my own. What I did was to write some editor macros for emacs to do the conversion. I didn’t even save the macros at the time, which shows how little value I placed on them. Today, I’d probably do it the same way if I had to again – or perhaps write a simple program in Perl or awk to do it.
In Conclusion, you’ve got a pretty easy task ahead of you, provided the floppies themselves are still readable (sometimes a challenge with old floppies).
Good Luck!
