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

[Lennart Sorensen]

> 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.

Certainly 5.1 for DOS worked very well at the things it did.  5.1 for
windows was a buggy disaster, 5.2 was more stable.  6 never seemed to
please wordperfect users and then it seems it was too late.  Word had
taken over, just as excel did to lotus 123.  I do remember 5.1 for DOS
was when they added mouse support and some attempts at menus to try and
be more friendly to new users that didn't already know all the keyboard
shortcuts.

I am not sure how wordperfect could have added new features that would
take advantage of being on a graphical system without hurting some of
the features people liked about wordperfect.

As for market share I think that depends how people measure it.  I found
one page that claimed wordperfect had a 2% market share putting them
apparently in fourth place, but it wasn't clear how they were counting
(by users?  by companies?  Not clear at all).

-- 
Len Sorensen