[PLUG] For those who used WordPerfect

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Mon Sep 20 06:35:03 UTC 2004


On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 rsteff.l at comcast.net wrote:

> I'll give those a try, but I'm really spoiled. I'd like to keep thinking
> about document writing with one tool--at least for the kinds of documents
> I write.

Dick,

   By all means, pick the appropropriate tool for the writing you do most
often. I've come to really like the LyX frontend to LaTeX and it is highly
productive for me.

> Too bad Novell sold WP to Corel. If they still had it, maybe someone could
> convince them to release the code to WP 5.1. As I recall, WP 6, while a
> DOS program, tried to hold on to their customers early in the "let's all
> use GUI's" mentality era. It didn't go over that well. I think that was
> about the time Win 3.1 came out, along with Word.

   I had long e-mail exchanges with the head of Corel's WP/7-8 support group
for linux. They had patches written and ready to go for bugs that I
encountered but upper management would not permit the release. They also
wanted to do a native linux port but that was denied also. It turns out that
all that time Corel was talking with Microsoft about financial assistance.
They got that. Then Microsoft insisted they kill the WP/linux efforts and
that whole team (who had done the original UNIX port for Novell) was let go.
Once it was dead, I read, Microsoft pulled out. Or, at least, scaled way
back in their financial support of Corel. Same behavior Redmond has
exhibited for two decades.

   The last version of WP/DOS that I ran was 6.02c. It was terriffic! I
almost got it working on linux under dosemu, too.

   Germane to wine: don't use any on a distribution set because they are too
old. Grab the latest build from the winehq.org Web site and build that. I
almost have MapInfo working on wine. When I get there I no longer need
VMware.

Rich

-- 
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>




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