Fwd: [Contributors] Microsoft Windows Is Offically Broken

[Patrick May]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2005 at 01:27:58AM -0500, Jim Cornette wrote:
> tfreeman at intel.digichem.net wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, 25 Nov 2005, Jim Cornette wrote:
> >
> >>Strong wrote:
> >>The concept  was  to load wordperfect under Linux. Also WordPerfect was 
> >>working on a program that was able to run Microsoft applications under 
> >>Linux. MicroSoft bought WordPerfect out and closed development on the 
> >>project and stripped out the code WordPerfect developed for the feat.
> >>I was going to buy it when it came out. I believe there was a version of 
> >>WordPerfect Linux that actually made it to the stores. I do not know 
> >>whatever happened to the information on the web.
> >>I'll try WordPerfect Linux to see what comes up.
> >>What is a competent search engine? Google seems to be falling apart. It 
> >>could not find the sun in midday now.

Microsoft took a pretty decent stake in Corel. I think it was much along the
lines of their investment in Apple years ago. They needed a competitor.
WordPerfect is still in active development, but I think on Windows only.

I personally purchased WordPerfect 8 for Linux retail. IIRC, it went for $50.

It was also available
as a free download, sans the font installer. It dated from the late 90s. Was a
LibC 5 app. The last distro I could run it under was RH 6.2 as it still had
the LibC 5 compatability RPM. You could even get the download version in a
Word Perfect for Linux Bible book as well. There was a very active community
who used it as well.

They did market the Wine compiled version for a while. But the write-once and
run on Windows and Linux effort failed, even with Wine. Though they did give
back quite a bit of work to the Wine project.

At the time it was, IMHO, the best word processor on Linux. Version 8 was a
native Linux app ported by a company for Corel. The only weird this was that
it had it's own printing engine. But you could have it call a different
application, like Kprint to do other stuff. It also only used PostScript
fonts.

> >Word Perfect, when it was a standalone company, had a version of Word 
> >Perfect (the software) for various Unix OS's, including Linux if I recall 
> >correctly. Then Novell bought the company, and in the shakeup the product 
> >fell behind MS Word/Office, although it became an Office suit in its own 
> >right about that time. Under the original Caldera Linux product (rebranded 
> >RH 3.25 or some such thing) I ran the Linux version of the office suite. 

The office suite from Novell was PerfectOffice and was around the WP 6.2 days.
I worked with it around 96-98 or so.

Caldera's distro was OpenLinux and was derived from RH back in the day. (It
was actually my first distro I ever tried (and failed on.)

> >Corel bought the product, bringing more damage to the table as things got 
> >moved yet again. As I recall, Corel was (and started?? did??) 
> >compiling the whole office suite to run with Wine binaries, so in theory 
> >you could either run under Windows or under Wine with the same binaries. 

It pretty much failed. Was slow and buggy by all accounts. They ran their own
custom Wine version. Though it would run side-by-side with an official Wine
install. They had the suite (ver. 9 or 10, as well as their PhotoPaint or
whatever it was.)

> >There was also some effort, as I recall, to port portions/the whole mess 
> >to Java, but I think that was pretty still born.
> >
> >FWIW, IMHO, Novell killed a great product and the last real agressive 
> >customer sevice organization in consumer computing. The times I called WP 
> >help, I may have waited online for some time, but the techs I spoke with 
> >_knew_ the product, followed up, and spoke a brand of english I could 
> >understand.  I was very sorry to see that service go away.
> >
> >  
> >
> Thanks for the info. Searches for info revealed timetables where the 
> UNIX, VAX, Amiga, and other hardware types were mentioned. There were 
> mentions of their JAVA attempts also in that timeframe. Your 
> recollection helped me piece together some of the events.
> 
> I'll lookup Caldera Linux, which was found on some of the searches. 
> (with many different search engines)
> 
> Jim
> 

Caldera is now The SCO Group. The Caldera Linux product was OpenLinux. It had
a per-seat charge and was targeted at the desktop market. It failed,
miserably.

Patrick