[Glastonbury] Re: agenda for next meeting & a couple of queries

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 05:33:39PM +0000, info at wccl.co.uk wrote:
> 
> Get someone with WordPerfect to show you them- - - Non-WordPerfect users have 
> no idea what they are missing. Not to say everyone wants to see the codes but 
> I would guess most people with WordPerfect wouldn't be without them once they 
> have tried using them. A regular wail in WordPerfect's customer contact group 
> in the late 1990's (and perhaps still for all I know, I haven't contributed 
> for quite a while) was that they had been forced by the company they worked 
> for to transfer to say Word or perhaps some other product which didn't have 
> the Reveal Codes and they were as a result thoroughly fed up. This was in the 
> days when PCs were being fitted with Microsoft Word as part of the PC 
> package. When we bought our first PC, a little before Windows became 
> ubiquitious, the PC came blank and everything had to be loaded. So we chose 
> the most famous and most popular WP of the time - Word Perfect. 
> 
When I joined my current employer in 1992, all the senior people in the 
office had been given laptops with WP 5.1. No one knew how to drive them
- because I had it at home, I wrote a training manual in my copious free
time and taught all my seniors how to use WP :)  I upgraded as far
as WP 6 and then gave up, having paid full price for each version.
Once Corel bought it, the product was doomed - just like Ventura
Publisher.
  
> So far as I recall, OOffice may have been developed from WordStar? I remember 
> using WordStar in black screen. It wasn't as interesting as WordPerfect and 
> definitely no revealed codes.
> 
No, WordStar was it's own animal. Star (Publishing) GmbH were a German
company who built Star Office on their own. They were eventually bought
out by Sun Microsystems who wanted the Solaris version of the word processor,
primarily, but could do with something cross platform. The code base was
forked and dual licensed - OpenOffice is "free, developed, debugged and
widely tested" StarOffice, as it were, which then forms the basis for the 
commercial StarOffice.
> 
> I'll shut up about word processors now.
> 
> Everyone's comments always greatly appreciated.
> 
> Regards
> Ros
> Wells Computer Consultants Ltd
>
HTH,

Andy