Office software on FreeDOS

Because the FreeDOS repository only includes open source software for which source code is available, it includes relatively little in the way of productivity software. Spreadsheets, word processors and so on tended to be commercial products. This is just a list of free (as in beer) products that you can use on (Free)DOS. Because FreeDOS does not include non-open software in its repository, these files are not available there, and must be chased down on the web.

Many commercial tools are available as ‘abandoneware’. I have tried to only list things that have been explicitly placed into the public domain by a legitimate owner of the IP. I may be wrong. Tell me if I am.

I am looking at word processing, spreadsheets, information manager and PDF viewer. The Ability suite contains some other tools.

Other categories of things — image manipulation, news and email reading, printing and PostScript, will (or have been) dealt with elsewhere.

For more options, some even packaged ready for install, go here: https://clasqm.github.io/freedos-repo/Productivity.html. (Excellent site.)

Word processing

Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS

Word for DOS was never a dominant product, not when it was up against WordPerfect. But it is quite usable and is freely available.  Go to http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/WIN98/EN-US/Wd55_ben.exe.

To install, use lynx or wget or whatever to download the file (you might just google “wd55_ben.exe”). Copy the exe file into an empty folder (say c:\wordtemp) and run it — it will unzip flat in that folder. In fact, though it is an exe file, it it better to unzip it using unzip that comes with FreeDOS, because then appropriate subdirectories will be created:

c:\> cd wordtemp
c:\wordtemp\> unzip wd55_ben.exe
c:\wordtemp\> setup

And away you go.

The best thing about this version of Word is that it can save as an early form of RTF, so you can get files out of it and into something more modern. Of course, it cannot be expected to read modern RTF, but, still…

VDE (Video Display Editor)

VDE is a very light, very powerful text editor that has many of the text manipulation tools you might expect but also comes with the kind of formatting tools you expect from a word processor.

https://sites.google.com/site/vdeeditor/Home/vde-files (this page hosts a whole lot of really useful utilities!)

The same page lists a utility to convert VDE files to/from RTF.

1. Download the zip.
2. Unzip into say c:\vde
3. run vinst to customise.

Here is a screenshot, but do be aware you can customise the colours, and even install macro packages that mimic WordPerfect key strokes, and so on. In this shot, the menu has been pulled down; usually you have a lot more screen real estate. VDE has a very powerful set of formatting commands, can do bold, italic, strikethrough, super/subscript and so on. Anybody who liked Ctrl+K editors, or does not like using a mouse and does not mind spending a little time customising their workspace, would find it a very interesting option to explore. It is/was very popular on the HP LX series of palmtops because of its very small size on disk and in memory, especially when considered relative to how powerful it it. It can do most word processing, but also makes for a very powerful text editor.

FLWriter

Georg Potthast wrote a whole bunch of useful software using his port of FLTK to DOS. Here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/fltk-dos/files/Applications/Binary%20versions%20of%20FLTK%20applications/

FLWriter is a graphical, flexible word processor that works with some useful modern file formats.

Download the flw12b.zip, flw12ext.zip and flw12con.zip.

Let’s say we put them in c:\fltk

unzip flw12b.zip, maintaining paths

Then rename the resulting folder to flwriter, then unzip the flw12ext.zip file. cd into the flwriter directory and run the program.

FLWriter has a modern, GUI look to it. It can generate PDF and other useful formats. I find it a little sluggish and occasionally it seems to fall over or freeze, but it’s pretty nifty. The flw12con.zip archive includes subarchives that contain versions of convertors to work with DOC (not DOCX), WordPerfect and LaTeX; the notes say ‘conversion is not lossless!’

FLWriter looks good, but to be honest I have found it hard to get it to work reliably.

Personal Information Management

There is only one option that I know of here! Lotus Agenda is freeware. The only problem is the download from Lotus is in the form of a bunch of 720 KB floppy images. Now, this can work because you can put them in a virtual drive on VirtualBox, but it is a lot easier to got to:

http://www.bobnewell.net/filez/agenda.exe

And download this file and unzip it in the root of your FreeDOS VM. (I’m using > as a generic prompt.)

> fdnpkg install wget
> c:
> cd \
c:\> wget http://www.bobnewell.net/filez/agenda.exe
c:\> agenda
c:\> del agenda.exe
c:\> cd agenda
c:\> a

Agenda is very powerful but takes some getting used to.  It allows free-form entry of information, and then you can group it in all kinds of ways. Many of its users feel that nothing else has ever been able to replace it.

http://www.bobnewell.net/nucleus/bnewell.php?itemid=186 contains links to everything you could want to know.

Spreadsheet

As-Easy-As

The premier option here is probably — As-Easy-As. Lotus 123 was the dominant DOS spreadsheet. As-Easy-As was ‘as easy as 123’. It is from TRIUS Inc, and they made it available.

http://www.triusinc.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10

You’ll find a download link and a manual, plus registration information for both. How friendly is that!  (Ser Number: 570-110-0424-3, Manual Password: ASA57Licensed3974). Go to a temporary file directory and:

> wget http://www.triusinc.com/old_files/asa57.exe
> wget http://www.triusinc.com/old_files/asa57_manual.exe
> unzip asa57.exe
> install

And off you go. Put the serial number in when prompted.

A simple plot — I have not customised it or done any labelling. ASA can do better than this!

Unzip the manual in the same way; it is a passworded file and you’ll need the manual password to get at the underlying PDF. Reading PDF on FreeDOS really needs muPDF, but that’s in another posting. Seeing as we’re talking about VirtualBox a lot of the time, you can always read the manual on the host.

InstaCalc

InstaCalc, we are reliably informed, is available for use for free. Google for “instaca3.zip”, or go here: https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/simtelnet/msdos/spredsht/, and install it by unzipping the archive and running the install program. If that does not work, manually unzip files.zip and just run the program.

Special feature: One of the problems with DOS is that it is single-tasking. So if you want to use a word processor, then switch to a spreadsheet and so on, you have to keep opening and closing applications and files. It’s a pain. InstaCalc can run as a TSR (terminate and stay resident) program. That means you can start it and leave it suspended, then start another program, then recall InstaCalc using a shortcut key combination, do something in it, and grab the result to use in, say, your word processor, saving a lot of back-and-forth messing about.

sprsht

This is one of Georg Potthast’s FLTK tools, and is also very handy. See the URLs either for FLWriter (above) or muPDF (below).

Integrated office suite

Ability Plus 3 is a complete office suite, made by the people behind Ability Office, a product that is still being maintained and is a much less expensive alternative to Microsoft Offfice. They have kindly made the old DOS version available on their website: https://www.ability.com/en/support/dos.
It contains a spreadsheet, word processor, graphing tool, database and  so on.

1. Go to the link.
2. Download AB3.ZIP
3. Create c:\AB3 (or whetever)
4. Copy AB3.ZIP into there.
5. c:\AB3> unzip ab3.zip
6. ab3.bat

And you are away. It does not create its own directory on unzipping, so create AB3 yourself and so on.

I have not used it much. But the ‘Flip’ menu (F9) allows you to bring up say a calculator in the middle of your word processing, and you can swap out to your spreadsheet and come back, and so on, so it gives a multitasking-like environment. None of the individual components seem massively powerful, but the combination is very slick and light and easy to use. There’s also a kind of terminal. Not sure what it can connect with… one option is Xmodem, though.

The main issue seems to me to be that the file formats are likely to be obscure, so getting text and stuff in and out might be tricky for anything other than plain text. You can print to file, which might help a bit.

PDF viewer

A PDF viewer is pretty necessary these days. I have had best luck with Georg Potthast’s port of MuPDF to DOS.

It looks very sleek and modern.

Download mupdf.zip — it’s at the links above, but if using a browser within FreeDOS, you might was to try this link: https://www.jumpjet.info/Application-Software/DOS/Viewers/2/viewers.htm

Here is the MTCP user manual viewed in mupdf. Unzip it; it will create its own directory. It has no file browser, just run it from the command line (using go.bat, possibly renamed to mupdf.bat) after putting the mupdf directory in your path:

So between these tools one can be productive on FreeDOS in an office, document-preparation sense. Of course all the tools are limited in what they can do compared to what is current in 2020. But, there you go.

Wherever you go, there you are.

Reading DisplayWrite and other old word processor files on a modern computer

DisplayWrite was a family of word processors from IBM in the 1980s. They were quite good in many ways, but never made it into the GUI era. DisplayWrite 3, for example, does not even have italics — it really is like a typewriter on a computer.

The default file format on DisplayWrite is a binary format. The default file extension is .TXT, but they are not what we think of as text files (I used to use DW3 as the extension). I have seen the odd request on the web about how to read old DisplayWrite files, so I thought I would document it here.

The trick is to go via WordPerfect 5.1 format, which can be read in by LibreOffice, because of the amazing stability of the WordPerfect file format.

First, download this convert.exe utility that used to come with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS (I have no idea how long the link will remain live):

ftp://ftp.corel.com/pub/WordPerfect/wpdos/5x/convert.exe

Then, copy the file into a DOSBox or DOSBox-X installation — DOSBox is easy to install, I leave to to you.

Put your DisplayWrite file in the same folder as the convert.exe program, run DOSBox and mount that folder as a drive in DOSBox.

Run convert.exe and …

We enter the existing file name and the one to convert to. This program can use a DisplayWrite file, but will also do RFT (not RTF) and FFT (revisable-form-text and final-form-text), both of which DisplayWrite can output.

To convert a DW3 file, use option C, as above. You can also use DW3 to export the file as RFT then use option 2 (option 3 might work too, because DW can export to FFT); in any case, do not define a CRS file (whatever that is). In the end, you get a WP5 file. Double-click on that in Windows (Linux, whatever) and select LibreOffice (swriter.exe on Windows) to open it. (Or, if you have it, a modern version of WordPerfect.) Can Word open WP5 files?

Here it is:

Before (in DW3)

This file includes formatted text (as much as DW3 can do that), centred text, cursor drawing and strike out (the row of hyphens near the bottom is how text struck out with hyphens is rendered; the row of Xs is text struck out with X).

This is how it looks when converted to RFT within DW3 then converted to WP5 format using convert.exe (option 2) then opened in LibreOffice. I have taken the liberty of (1) setting 2 cm margins all around, because the margins come out funny, and (2) putting the cursor draw stuff in a monospaced font, because that makes sense. That’s all I have done manually.

After (in LibreOffice)

You can see that the conversion is pretty good. The centring is not quite right, and all the struck-out text has a simple line through it — not struck out with X or hyphens (in fact, DW3 lets you choose your strikeout character). I have not bothered to test page numbers, and other page elements. I don’t know about DisplayWrite 4 or 5 documents.

Conclusion

convert.exe is freely downloadable from Corel, the actual owners, so is publicly available. LibreOffice is open source, as is DOSBox(-X). Thus, we have a route to convert a handful of old file formats to WP5 format, which LibreOffice can read very nicely and convert to odt, docx etc. Note — convert.exe can also convert WP5 files to RFT and FFT (and some others, maybe?), so if for some insane reason you wanted to get a modern file into one of these old word processors, it might be possible, if you can first save it as a WP5 format file…

The old formats include:

• Navy DIF
• Revisable form text
• Final form text
• WordStar 3.3
• MultiMate Advantage II
• Microsoft Word 4.0
• DisplayWrite

This means it will probably work for some IBM DCA formats.

Some features may be lost or incomplete — I have done no thorough tests — but this should allow you to extract text, at least, from old formats that cannot otherwise be read.

PS: ftp://ftp.corel.com/pub/WordPerfect/wpdos/5x is handy for all WP5.1 fans. And ftp://ftp.corel.com/pub/WordPerfect/wpdos/60/ is worth a look.

Final note, for the DOS experts:

If convert.exe is in your path, you can create an empty file called null.crs, and then you can create a batch file, say dw3towp5.bat and in it put this:

convert %1 %2 c path\to\null.crs

so, for example, let’s say null.crs is in my DisplayWrite program folder, c:\DW3:

convert %1 %2 c c:\dw3\null.crs

Now, if this batch file is in with your DW3 files, or maybe in your path, you can convert very simply! Something like:

c:\> dw3towp5 file.dw3 file.wp5

Back to the future.

AlphaSmart Neo — the ultimate smart phone accessory!

So, here we are — an experiment. A square-to-flat USB cable (that is, USB-A [the familiar flat one] to USB-B [the familiar square one that often is used for printers], male to male), then a USB-A female to USB micro male cable [the one that charges your android phone], and an AlphaSmart Neo.

Here is the Neo:

The Neo, turned off

The Neo has 2 USB ports. The flat one (A) is for connecting directly to a printer, the squarer one is for connecting to a computer, and when you do so the Neo becomes a USB keyboard.

A indicates the type A port and B the … well, you get the idea

For all I know you can get a cable that goes straight from male type B to male micro, but I don’t have one, but I do have one of these:

The A to micro adapter

So as long as your phone has OTG capability (‘on the go’, apparently) — which means the USB port on it can be used for more than just data transfer and charging — you can plug your Neo into the phone and use it to, I dunno, write your blog. All but the cheapest phones have this capability.

So I did the experiment; and can I type on the phone using the Neo? Yes! Whoa! That is awesome! The Neo runs for months on 3 AA batteries, and is a full-sized keyboard. Further, the Neo is more than just a keyboard. It is also a word processor. It can remember thousands of words (which it saves keystroke by keystroke and you never have to hit Ctrl+s), and can spell check them too. And then you plug it into your phone and hit send and it uploads the lot, typing it into whatever application you have open at the time. So, for example, you can do what I did for this post — you can type your blog post on the Neo, get the spelling right, review it (though the Neo screen is only 5 lines tall), then open the WordPress App and dump the text in by hitting ‘send’. No trying to type scads of stuff on your little phone keyboard.

And these days Neos are not exactly expensive. Just check out ebay. Around US$30 (plus postage).

I think this is pretty cool!

One of the things I like about the Neo is the LCD screen. Yes, no colour, no internet — but you can use it in direct sunlight, unlike a laptop or phone screen, and the other thing is the keyboard — it is actually quite solid-feeling and responsive. The earlier AlphaSmarts (2000, I’m looking at you) had a much cheaper-feeling keyboard, and a fixed text size. (And no USB output; and I have not tried a PS/2-to-USB cable.) The 3000 has USB output but fixed text size, so it would work for this phone trick as well (note — I am guessing). The Neo is more full-featured — spell check, find/replace, word count, thesaurus, all useful for the writer on the move. It also has adjustable text size, so when your eyes are weary you can write in letters 2 cm tall, and when you want to see a little more on the screen you can shrink it. 6 lines is the maximum. Not a lot. The Neo always reminds me of the head of that robot in The Black Hole, the red one with a slot for eyes.

Worst thing about it is the position of the delete key and Esc — both to the right of the space bar. On/Off is where my fingers expect Esc, and Send (to transmit the words to the phone or computer) is where my fingers expect Delete. So I go to hit Delete, hit Send instead, then go to his Esc to stop the sending and accidentally turn the unit off… Dumb decisions, really dumb (AlphaSmart was founded by former Apple employees,. I vaguely recall, so it makes sense that it has terrible design flaws hiding in there. Don’t talk to me about one button mouses). But apart from that, everything is where you expect it, and the thing is quite good for rapid typing. It also contains a couple of other programs — Applets, I think they call them (Apple-ts, perhaps) — but I never use them. One is a calculator, and one is just device settings.

I’d like to be able to disable caps lock, and reassign keys (to fix issues noted), but that’s being difficult.

 

Nifty