On Tue, May 7, 2024 at 10:18 PM Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@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