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

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Tue, May 7, 2024 at 10:18 PM Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:


> 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.


The non-GUI version of WP was the product in its prime. Before there were
drop-down menus there were the famous WordPerfect keyboard overlays that
were miles ahead of what else was available at the time. In a previous life
I did quite well installing SCO Xenix systems that connected Wyse 60 or DEC
VT100 terminals using Digiboard serial cards, running mostly multi-user
versions of WordPerfect and the Progress DBMS.
Those days were great but I don't miss them. Wiring the ends of serial
cables, fine-tuning the "standard" to the idiosyncrasies of each device,
took up a massive amount of my time.

MS Windows 3.1, and then MS Word for Windows, killed WordPerfect which was
hesitant to cannibalize its legacy product -- textbook Innovator's Dilemma
stuff. It's GUI version never caught on and it became a distant second
place pretty quickly. I don't know if it's still in second place (as an
offline word processor) because I don't know how much inroad has been made
by LibreOffice/OpenOffice.

-- 
Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
@evanleibovitch / @el56
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