Off-topic nostalgia: CorelDraw and WordPerect on sale
Hi all.
From the and-you-thought-they-were-dead department:
I've come across an offer at a site I watch that piqued my interest: A bundle of - The 2021 version of CorelDraw Essentials - A bunch of add-on brush patterns - Corel Painter 8 - Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 25 - WordPerfect Standard 2021 is going for CAD $41.23, with some proceeds going towards the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. Windows only, unfortunately, digital download. https://www.humblebundle.com/software/corel-productivity-creativity-essentia... The relevance to GTALUG is weak but exists. Once upon a time, Corel was a great Canadian software success story, and for what seems like a very short period of time was a massive supporter of Linux that actually produced its own distribution. Its only hardware offering was a Linux box called the Netwinder. At one time I thought the company was ready to offer a real across-the-board challenge to Microsoft, then had a change of management and lost all interest in that. Anyway, much time has passed since those days when I learned that working in vector graphics was more satisfying than pixels. I've long since moved from CorelDraw to Inkscape (which happily reads .cdr files). And WordPerfect? I'm just amazed that it still exists. I've kept all of the vector clipart that shipped with early CorelDraw versions and sometimes they come in handy.. Anyway... anyone who has an investment in Corel-specific skills that they want to maintain may find this a good deal. For some of the rest of us that can remember, https://www.humblebundle.com/software/corel-productivity-creativity-essentia..., perhaps, a flash of nostalgia. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56
Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote on 2024-05-02 16:35:
Once upon a time, Corel was a great Canadian software success story
Interestingly, I had this open in a tab when this message arrived: Senior DevOps Engineer COREL CORPORATION USA Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, V6C 2W6 Senior DevOps Engineer Push the boundaries of tech. In your sweatpants. https://ca.talent.com/view?id=2cb2e200e802
On Thu, May 02, 2024 at 07:35:42PM -0400, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
Hi all.
From the and-you-thought-they-were-dead department:
I've come across an offer at a site I watch that piqued my interest: A bundle of
- The 2021 version of CorelDraw Essentials - A bunch of add-on brush patterns - Corel Painter 8 - Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 25 - WordPerfect Standard 2021
is going for CAD $41.23, with some proceeds going towards the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. Windows only, unfortunately, digital download.
https://www.humblebundle.com/software/corel-productivity-creativity-essentia...
The relevance to GTALUG is weak but exists. Once upon a time, Corel was a great Canadian software success story, and for what seems like a very short period of time was a massive supporter of Linux that actually produced its own distribution. Its only hardware offering was a Linux box called the Netwinder. At one time I thought the company was ready to offer a real across-the-board challenge to Microsoft, then had a change of management and lost all interest in that.
Anyway, much time has passed since those days when I learned that working in vector graphics was more satisfying than pixels. I've long since moved from CorelDraw to Inkscape (which happily reads .cdr files). And WordPerfect? I'm just amazed that it still exists. I've kept all of the vector clipart that shipped with early CorelDraw versions and sometimes they come in handy..
Anyway... anyone who has an investment in Corel-specific skills that they want to maintain may find this a good deal. For some of the rest of us that can remember, https://www.humblebundle.com/software/corel-productivity-creativity-essentia..., perhaps, a flash of nostalgia.
My recollection of corel's linux was the pile of license violations they were doing. https://slashdot.org/story/99/09/20/1051226/corel-linux-beta-license-violate... Invalid terms for the end user that violated the GPL, making wrapper binaries around apt so they could call it from their proprietary package manager without linking to it, etc. So yeah I have no good memories about Corel's attempt at linux. -- Len Sorensen
On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 11:53 AM Lennart Sorensen < lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
My recollection of corel's linux was the pile of license violations they were doing.
https://slashdot.org/story/99/09/20/1051226/corel-linux-beta-license-violate...
You're aware that the massive Slashdot thread was about the Beta version of their first distro release, right? I was not on the Beta program but I did use the final product. I cut them some slack because this was their first FOSS product and their teams were not good with the transition. That got straightened out between beta and release, which means the beta served its purpose. The license jargon was cleared up and source code was made available in the first and subsequent releases. (down the shashdot thread someone actually examined the Corel legalese and found that it did NOT violate the GPL or usurp original author rights.) The wrapper around apt was to make it easier to use, I was able to use apt without restrictions from the shell. Since then many other graphical wrappers around apt have been released. So yeah I have no good memories about Corel's attempt at linux.
Did you actually use it, or are you basing your views on a typical /. overreaction thread? I eventually stopped using Corel Linux, but not for any licensing issues. Their proprietary value-add was a little too geared for people who had never used Linux before and I didn't need that level of hand-holding. It was poor as a server. Still... regardless of one's thoughts on the quality or utility of their release, Corel did break ground in introducing Linux to a mainstream audience. They had a large presence at COMDEX where they launched the product and were the only mainstream consumer software company talking up FOSS, at a time when Microsoft was in all-out attack mode. "I can't complain, but sometimes I still do": Joe Walsh and most of Slashdot - Evan
I found Corel WordPerfect was unstable - even compared with Windows 98's wp. I could get some documents written in it, but I found myself using the Windows 98 copy more often. I recall there was some irony expressed at the time that WordPerfect originated as a Unix product, and its port to Microsoft came after. The irony was that the port to Corel Linux was a port from Windows, not a port from Unix, meaning that it had to use WINE libraries, which was the reason behind it being unstable. I think they did that to save money. I recall the experience being "so-so" but not "horrible". The last really good version of Wordperfect for Linux, I remember, came from before Corel obtained it, when it was part of a RedHat distro I had and had to be installed using RPM. I recall it being an old version of RPM that some years later I couldn't extract with a later version and gave up on the idea. But it was comparatively much more stable. Paul On 2024-05-05 10:17, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 11:53 AM Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
My recollection of corel's linux was the pile of license violations they were doing.
https://slashdot.org/story/99/09/20/1051226/corel-linux-beta-license-violate...
You're aware that the massive Slashdot thread was about the Beta version of their first distro release, right?
I was not on the Beta program but I did use the final product. I cut them some slack because this was their first FOSS product and their teams were not good with the transition. That got straightened out between beta and release, which means the beta served its purpose. The license jargon was cleared up and source code was made available in the first and subsequent releases.
(down the shashdot thread someone actually examined the Corel legalese and found that it did NOT violate the GPL or usurp original author rights.)
The wrapper around apt was to make it easier to use, I was able to use apt without restrictions from the shell. Since then many other graphical wrappers around apt have been released.
So yeah I have no good memories about Corel's attempt at linux.
Did you actually use it, or are you basing your views on a typical /. overreaction thread?
I eventually stopped using Corel Linux, but not for any licensing issues. Their proprietary value-add was a little too geared for people who had never used Linux before and I didn't need that level of hand-holding. It was poor as a server.
Still... regardless of one's thoughts on the quality or utility of their release, Corel did break ground in introducing Linux to a mainstream audience. They had a large presence at COMDEX where they launched the product and were the only mainstream consumer software company talking up FOSS, at a time when Microsoft was in all-out attack mode.
"I can't complain, but sometimes I still do": Joe Walsh and most of Slashdot
- Evan --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
On Sun, May 05, 2024 at 04:07:06PM -0400, sciguy via talk wrote:
I found Corel WordPerfect was unstable - even compared with Windows 98's wp. I could get some documents written in it, but I found myself using the Windows 98 copy more often. I recall there was some irony expressed at the time that WordPerfect originated as a Unix product, and its port to Microsoft came after. The irony was that the port to Corel Linux was a port from Windows, not a port from Unix, meaning that it had to use WINE libraries, which was the reason behind it being unstable. I think they did that to save money. I recall the experience being "so-so" but not "horrible".
The last really good version of Wordperfect for Linux, I remember, came from before Corel obtained it, when it was part of a RedHat distro I had and had to be installed using RPM. I recall it being an old version of RPM that some years later I couldn't extract with a later version and gave up on the idea. But it was comparatively much more stable.
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. -- Len Sorensen
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
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
On Sun, May 05, 2024 at 10:17:31AM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
You're aware that the massive Slashdot thread was about the Beta version of their first distro release, right?
Yes, but as far as I recall there was a lot of arguing over at least the wrapper around GPL tools like apt in the release version too. The totally nuts license issues for the beta got resolved in the release.
I was not on the Beta program but I did use the final product. I cut them some slack because this was their first FOSS product and their teams were not good with the transition. That got straightened out between beta and release, which means the beta served its purpose. The license jargon was cleared up and source code was made available in the first and subsequent releases. (down the shashdot thread someone actually examined the Corel legalese and found that it did NOT violate the GPL or usurp original author rights.) The wrapper around apt was to make it easier to use, I was able to use apt without restrictions from the shell. Since then many other graphical wrappers around apt have been released.
Yes but the other wrappers have been open source, not proprietary tools. As far as I remember corel wrote a wrapper program around apt that was open source so they could then call that wrapper from their graphical tool that was closed source, just so they could claim they weren't actually calling any GPL code from their code or at least didn't link against it.
Did you actually use it, or are you basing your views on a typical /. overreaction thread?
I did actually try it for a while. On a netwinder no less. I also tried BeOS on a BeBox around the same time. That's another OS I find some people seriously over hype. It really wasn't that interesting and made a lot of terrible design mistakes. If somehow Apple had decided BeOS in fact was something worth using as the future of the macintosh rather than nextstep that they went with, I am pretty sure apple would no longer exist.
I eventually stopped using Corel Linux, but not for any licensing issues. Their proprietary value-add was a little too geared for people who had never used Linux before and I didn't need that level of hand-holding. It was poor as a server.
Yeah it really didn't add anything particularly useful.
Still... regardless of one's thoughts on the quality or utility of their release, Corel did break ground in introducing Linux to a mainstream audience. They had a large presence at COMDEX where they launched the product and were the only mainstream consumer software company talking up FOSS, at a time when Microsoft was in all-out attack mode.
I would think the nice CD releases with 6 or so CDs from redhat you could pick up at book stores in the late 90s did a heck of a lot more than corel linux at getting linux to people. Corel linux seems like an easily forgotten nobody in the history of linux distributions. -- Len Sorensen
participants (5)
-
Evan Leibovitch -
Evan Leibovitch -
Lennart Sorensen -
Ron / BCLUG -
sciguy