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Corel seems like it's become a graveyard of old programs I used in the 1990s, like WinZip, PaintShop Pro and, amazingly, WordPerfect. And, of course, Corel Draw
by atombender 7y ago
Corel seems like it's become a graveyard of old programs I used in the 1990s, like WinZip, PaintShop Pro and, amazingly, WordPerfect. And, of course, Corel Draw.
Oh, and this September will be see 40-year anniversary of WordPerfect [1]. (Though WP for DOS only came out in 1982.)
I wonder what their strategy is with this acquisition, since there must be some money in there still.
[1] http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.html http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.html
- aduitsis 7y agoCame here to post that link! Amazingly, WP for DOS still receives love from various users! http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/#reason http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/#reason WordPerfect for DOS, in the opinion of many knowledgeable users, is still the greatest program ever written. Some of its features have not been matched even by the latest Windows software, and its interface remains unequaled for efficiency and elegance. Its support for multiple font formats has not been equaled by any other program or operating system, and its support for multiple alphabets, languages, and symbol sets has only been equaled by twenty-first-century versions of Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS.
- gmfawcett 7y agoAround 2005 or so, I met a religious scholar who still organized all his research in WordPerfect for DOS. He maintained volumes of notes and papers, collected over a decade or two. He refused to upgrade to the "obviously inferior" GUI versions. It was truly incredible to watch him navigate through his research. He moved like lightning through all that stuff! It was very much like watching an Emacs or Vim master. (At the time I thought: I should introduce this guy to Emacs and org-mode, he would feel right at home. But he had essentially built his own org-mode in WordPerfect already, so I doubt that he would have switched.) Props to you, Bill, wherever you are -- I hope that the blue WP background is still shining on your face. ----- This got me to thinking. Two things that my WP friend has in common with the Emacs/Vim crowd is that (a) his UI hasn't really changed in 20 years, and (b) the full feature set is discoverable and (macro) programmable. We tend to think that the latter point is more essential (it's the selling point of Emacs, the "programmable editor"), but we tend to overlook the value of the former point. We incur a cost due to the modern tendency to change application UIs on a whim -- either because of product switches ("this year's chat app") or actual UI changes to existing products (e.g., the Ribbon UI in the Office suite). It's the cost of lost opportunities for mastery. You can hone your Emacs or WP-DOS skills over a lifetime, and what you learned will never become obsolete, as long as you stick with that tool. But forced obsolescence has become a trend in application delivery, and so new generations of application users may never enjoy that sense of mastery. To me, this is very reminiscent of the "choose boring technology" article that was on HN just a couple days ago. You can spend your attention-credits on solving business problems, or you can spend them adapting to new tool interfaces every year or two.
- IgniteTheSun 7y agoI consider the version of WordPerfect for Dos that I was using in 1993 to be far superior to any other word processing system that I have ever used, bar none - and I have tried a lot of word processors over the years. WordPerfect was not my first text editing / word processing program - I had used others that I had liked for several years before I came across WordPerfect. I have been stuck using Microsoft Word at work for decades. If I recall correctly: Corel had agreed to rewrite WordPerfect in VBA as a condition for Microsoft to invest in it when it was on the ropes in the late 1990s. Once they did that, the quality went down quite a bit in my opinion. As I recall, WordPerfect once owned ~85% of the word processing market. WordPerfect was reasonably priced for students; I don't remember how much non-student licensing cost, but it did have a cost while Microsoft Word was free initially if I remember correctly.
- nashashmi 7y agoYou forgot to mention lotus.
- Scoundreller 7y agoSeems popular enough amongst law firms: https://www.google.com/search?q=who+uses+wordperfect https://www.google.com/search?q=who+uses+wordperfect
- pedalpete 7y agoThere was or is some tracking components for wordperfect that law firms use or used. According to quora and google searches, many law firms are switching to word because clients don't have wordperfect. It would have made sense in an age where everything was printed. https://www.quora.com/Why-do-lawyers-use-WordPerfect https://www.quora.com/Why-do-lawyers-use-WordPerfect
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y agoThey should export to PDF rather than sending word files.
- azinman2 7y agoHard to collaborate with a PDF. Lawyers also send docs to other lawyers.
- flomo 7y agoThis discussion is using the present tense for something which mostly happened like 20 years ago.
- IgniteTheSun 7y agoI don't think it was actually that long ago for law offices. WordPerfect was still a player amongst the general population even at the end of the 1990s, law offices held on for much longer. Complex documents were handled much better in WordPerfect than in Word.
- flomo 7y agoOkay, 15 years ago. I think it was Word 2000 which added whatever lawyer features were missing (something about word count iirc). Also the stickiness wasn't entirely the word processor but also document management systems implemented as WP extensions.
- hermitdev 7y agoI stopped using Word Perfect at version 8 on Win 9x. It was a fucking shit show. Used 5.1 on DOS immensely. 5.1 was great for its time.
- rladd 7y agoFun fact: WordPerfect was written in assembler for (I think) the Data General minicomputer. Every other version was cross-assembled to the given platform. This was told to me by Alan Ashton, the CEO and founder of WordPerfect, in around 1986. I instantly thought that their days were numbered.
- codebolt 7y agoWe can't have a discussion about the history of WordPerfect without mentioning this book: https://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml https://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml
- chao- 7y agoAs an adamant aficionado of PSP over Photoshop, I never forgave Corel for buying Jasc and turning PSP into just another CorelDRAW. If I had wanted CorelDRAW, I would have purchased CorelDRAW. I did not. I wanted Paintshop Pro, and I had it, for a time. A decade and a half later, though, my feelings are mostly numb. Edit: Why did I like PSP over PS? At the time, PSP had better support for my tablet, and had hotkeys that made more intuitive sense for me. I did use PS for a while, sparingly from 2010 to 2015. In the long run, I don't do art anymore, and mostly just web design, for which my company uses Figma anyway. Occasionally we might contact something from a UX designer who uses Sketch, but we just import it into Figma anyway. Photoshop might as well not exist as far as I am concerned.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoPSP was one of the few products that made Windows productive. It loaded quickly, worked smoothly, and the UI was elegant in a way that the PS UI still isn't. Many things about PS still irritate users in a "That's just wrong, stupid, and annoyingly poorly thought out, and why do you keep adding pointless new features instead of fixing this?" kind of a way. [1] PSP didn't do as much, but a lot of what it did do was more transparent and effortless. When Corel bought it, they turned it into PSP Pro X Plus Special Edition Platinum Millennium Marketing Bullshit Edition. All kinds of cruft appeared, some of it was entertaining, very little of it was useful, none of it was elegant or beautiful. [1] PSP had a "Create new from clipboard" option which created a new image from the clipboard with a single click. Boom. Done. In PS you have to select a new placeholder from a list of all other possible sizes, possibly after some scrolling and selecting, and then manually paste the image into the document. And now you have an image layer and a background layer, which is often not what you want.
- andybak 7y ago> PSP had a "Create new from clipboard" option Since forever (probably since PS 2.4 or so) choosing "New Document" in Photoshop defaults to the size of the document on the clipboard. My workflow is: Copy in one app > Switch to PS > CMD + N > Hit Enter > CMD + V
- pfarnsworth 7y agoMy friend says that WinZip makes $70M per year due to government contracts and inertia. There is zero development or costs, it's just a pure money maker for them.
- yitchelle 7y agoThat is a sweet definition of passive income. What other software have such a great income stream, especially one that has entrenched government contracts?
- avip 7y agoAnything that runs on AS400
- JaimeThompson 7y agoA good chuck of smaller banks still use AS400s
- codetrotter 7y agoCorel Painter remains a very impressive piece of software though, and I am sure it is popular among artists still.
- codingdave 7y agoI was thinking the same - for years, there was no other like it. There are some others now, but none as mature as Painter. For classically trained artists, it is an amazing piece of work. However, I would be curious if the market of fine artists who want to work in digital format is large enough to make it a profitable product line.
- throw0101a 7y ago> Oh, and this September will be see 40-year anniversary of WordPerfect [1]. The 'reveal codes' feature of WP 5.2 was just awesome. Does any GUI application have it?
- velcrovan 7y agoWeb sites
- richard_todd 7y agoThere is still WordPerfect for Windows, which has it. I tried using it again in 2010 or so, but found he program to be a little clunky UI-wise. My impression after reading support forums was that they spend minimal money on maintenance and don’t really develop it any more.
- mikepurvis 7y agoI think the closest thing in the modern world is probably side-by-side editors for things like Markdown and LaTeX, eg: https://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/ https://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/
- IgniteTheSun 7y agoMicrosoft Word tried to compete with it in the 1990s with a feature called "reveal formats" that was - in my opinion - a very poor imitation of it.