But perhaps the best part is that the company was run by programmers: It's a bit of a David and Goliath story, how they clawed their way to success over so many formidable opponents by simply dedicating themselves to creating an excellent product, and cultivating a vibrant community around that product both inside and outside the company. For one thing, the entire business was run in an agile, almost by-the-seat-of-their-pants way. Still, there's something intriguing about the fledgling SSI corporation. That, plus an almost fanatical dedication to cross-platform parity - even when the platforms they supported made little business sense - makes the final outcome almost inevitable. They didn't just bet on the wrong horse, they institutionalized a software culture that lived and died on character mode assumptions. WordPerfect, like many other companies at the time, never really made the transition from DOS to Windows.
I clicked through, read the first chapter, read the second chapter, and. Perhaps that's why the online book Almost Perfect, which documents the rise and fall of WordPerfect, is such a gripping read. I guess it's a testament to how quickly things change in the world of software you can dominate the world for years, only to be relegated to little more than a dimly remembered footnote in computing history a decade later.
The software is still limping along, barely, under the auspices of Corel corporation, as WordPerfect Office X4. I remember it well the very concept of word processing was synonymous with WordPerfect.Īnd now I can't even recall the last time I encountered a WordPerfect document, much less anyone who still uses WordPerfect. I'll always remember WordPerfect as the quintessential white text on blue screen application.įor a period from about 1985 to 1992, WordPerfect was the most popular word processing program in the world on virtually every computing platform.
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