[GTALUG] Off-topic nostalgia: CorelDraw and WordPerect on sale

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, May 05, 2024 at 04:07:06PM -0400, sciguy via talk wrote:
> I found Corel WordPerfect was unstable - even compared with Windows 98's wp.
> I could get some documents written in it, but I found myself using the
> Windows 98 copy more often. I recall there was some irony expressed at the
> time that WordPerfect originated as a Unix product, and its port to
> Microsoft came after. The irony was that the port to Corel Linux  was a port
> from Windows, not a port from Unix, meaning that it had to use WINE
> libraries, which was the reason behind it being unstable. I think they did
> that to save money. I recall the experience being "so-so" but not
> "horrible".
> 
> The last really good version of Wordperfect for Linux, I remember, came from
> before Corel obtained it, when it was part of a RedHat distro I had and had
> to be installed using RPM. I recall it being an old version of RPM that some
> years later I couldn't extract with a later version and gave up on the idea.
> But it was comparatively much more stable.

Well it seems originally it was on the Data General mini computer,
then DOS.  I do remember using 4.1 on an amiga.  What a joke that was.
It didn't even remotely try to be an amiga application and pretty much
any other word processor was a lot nicer to use on the amiga, even if
wordperfect had more features.  It seems a lot of the ports had the
same issue.  The macintosh version seems to have actually been a rewrite
trying to be a proper application there.  They eventually ported it to
a lot of unix variants once they had a C version of the code but it did
not start out that way.

-- 
Len Sorensen