Thanks for watching! Yeah, it seems odd that they printed all that clipart, but honestly, I found it easier to flip all those pages than trying to browse the clipart on the CD. There was quite a lot of lag as the CD spun up and down while trying to flip through all the clipart on the computer.
I think you should have commented more on "Free Software/Open Source ideology" of the time. Most users of linux on the desktop at that time, that I knew anyways, were rather fanatical about all the software being "open", (I don't think "FOSS" was termed yet) . For that matter there were still Stallman followers insisting on calling it "GNU/linux". Using closed source Windows binaries was incredibly tone deaf of Corel. A big turning point, by contrast, was Firefox, which came out in 2002. Having a significant and powerful Open Source app, on top of the completely dominant (but proprietary)Windows platform, not the other way 'round. Firefox was a major victory and, in my opinion, may have been more important to the FOSS movement than development of the Gnome or KDE desktops, and perhaps even linux itself on the desktop. Personally, at the time I had more hope that Apple would continue to support MKLinux, and later, that OS X would become as Open as Linux. On paper it may have made sense to Corel to get "practical" work done with a word processor that could handle Word documents. But those people weren't using linux at all! "True believers" were the real market (outside of servers), with a small contingent of frugal people who love the "free" in Free Software, as we'd say, as in "free beer". I don't know if it was the intention of this video to just demonstrate the use of this package as Corel intended it, but acceptance was it's major problem, which I wish you spent a bit more time on that. There was no clear advantage to average users (or "lusers" lol), certainly not at $120, and not to use this as a daily driver. Many Linux users were using Emacs or Vi, and weren't looking for a Linux Word Processor. Especially if you had to run Wine anyways, and knew how to set it up; in that situation, most of the time you'd just run Wordpad in Wine anyways (I forget the state of Word on Wine at the time). Corel Wordperfect was a solution looking for a problem to solve, for an audience that didn't exist. Readers, I welcome disagreements if any of you did try using this, without soon totally giving up on it.
To be honest, I don't delve into what the philosophy was at the time, because really, I don't know. I was 15 years old and just playing around with things and didn't really understand the larger ramifications the free software movement had on the technology industry. I was more concerned with typing up research papers for school then writing kernel drivers. I was mostly going by what reviewers said at the time, which as far as I can tell was overwhelmingly positive, from magazine articles and web articles I can find. Having said that, I really appreciate your perspective! Thanks for watching this video!
I guess it couldn't compete with OpenOffice that came out in 2002. Tbh, I had no idea commercial office suites existed at that time. I got into Linux between 2002-04 and the only office suites for Linux I knew were OpenOffice and KOffice, both open source. At least for private use, school and university there was no need to run a microsoft product in wine, which was not that good at that time anyway. But that is just my opinion. If I had known, I maybe would've bought this WordPerfect box for the Tux mascot, the cliparts and the Railroad Tycoon II port alone...
It was kind of a chicken and egg problem really--a polished, professional desktop office suite would have done a lot towards increased adoption of desktop Linux, but then in 2000 there weren't enough Linux users willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for a polished, professional desktop office suite. But they proved you could use Wine to release cross-compatible Windows apps in Linux, which eventually led to the success of Proton and the Steam Deck project. The real sad thing is that every version of WordPerfect after 12 has a "garbage" rating in WineHQ... Wine can run 80% of Steam games but it can't even install a basic office suite with a now-ancient codebase.
Thank you for watching! I hadn't realized versions of wordperfect after that one don't run in wine! Such a shame. At least now a days we've got LibreOffice, and OpenOffice before that. Also with a lot of organizations going to cloud solutions like Google Docs, the office suite is becoming much less important.
That was a blast from the past, thanks. I can't believe they printed that clipart.
Thanks for watching!
Yeah, it seems odd that they printed all that clipart, but honestly, I found it easier to flip all those pages than trying to browse the clipart on the CD. There was quite a lot of lag as the CD spun up and down while trying to flip through all the clipart on the computer.
Thank you, Moose!
Moose is happy to keep me on my toes.
I think you should have commented more on "Free Software/Open Source ideology" of the time. Most users of linux on the desktop at that time, that I knew anyways, were rather fanatical about all the software being "open", (I don't think "FOSS" was termed yet) . For that matter there were still Stallman followers insisting on calling it "GNU/linux". Using closed source Windows binaries was incredibly tone deaf of Corel.
A big turning point, by contrast, was Firefox, which came out in 2002. Having a significant and powerful Open Source app, on top of the completely dominant (but proprietary)Windows platform, not the other way 'round. Firefox was a major victory and, in my opinion, may have been more important to the FOSS movement than development of the Gnome or KDE desktops, and perhaps even linux itself on the desktop. Personally, at the time I had more hope that Apple would continue to support MKLinux, and later, that OS X would become as Open as Linux.
On paper it may have made sense to Corel to get "practical" work done with a word processor that could handle Word documents. But those people weren't using linux at all! "True believers" were the real market (outside of servers), with a small contingent of frugal people who love the "free" in Free Software, as we'd say, as in "free beer".
I don't know if it was the intention of this video to just demonstrate the use of this package as Corel intended it, but acceptance was it's major problem, which I wish you spent a bit more time on that.
There was no clear advantage to average users (or "lusers" lol), certainly not at $120, and not to use this as a daily driver. Many Linux users were using Emacs or Vi, and weren't looking for a Linux Word Processor. Especially if you had to run Wine anyways, and knew how to set it up; in that situation, most of the time you'd just run Wordpad in Wine anyways (I forget the state of Word on Wine at the time). Corel Wordperfect was a solution looking for a problem to solve, for an audience that didn't exist. Readers, I welcome disagreements if any of you did try using this, without soon totally giving up on it.
To be honest, I don't delve into what the philosophy was at the time, because really, I don't know. I was 15 years old and just playing around with things and didn't really understand the larger ramifications the free software movement had on the technology industry. I was more concerned with typing up research papers for school then writing kernel drivers.
I was mostly going by what reviewers said at the time, which as far as I can tell was overwhelmingly positive, from magazine articles and web articles I can find.
Having said that, I really appreciate your perspective! Thanks for watching this video!
I guess it couldn't compete with OpenOffice that came out in 2002. Tbh, I had no idea commercial office suites existed at that time. I got into Linux between 2002-04 and the only office suites for Linux I knew were OpenOffice and KOffice, both open source. At least for private use, school and university there was no need to run a microsoft product in wine, which was not that good at that time anyway. But that is just my opinion. If I had known, I maybe would've bought this WordPerfect box for the Tux mascot, the cliparts and the Railroad Tycoon II port alone...
Unlike Microsoft, WordPerfect uses the same file formatting (.wpd) for every version. I can open WordPerfect DOS 5.1 file that I did back in college.
It was kind of a chicken and egg problem really--a polished, professional desktop office suite would have done a lot towards increased adoption of desktop Linux, but then in 2000 there weren't enough Linux users willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for a polished, professional desktop office suite. But they proved you could use Wine to release cross-compatible Windows apps in Linux, which eventually led to the success of Proton and the Steam Deck project. The real sad thing is that every version of WordPerfect after 12 has a "garbage" rating in WineHQ... Wine can run 80% of Steam games but it can't even install a basic office suite with a now-ancient codebase.
Thank you for watching!
I hadn't realized versions of wordperfect after that one don't run in wine! Such a shame.
At least now a days we've got LibreOffice, and OpenOffice before that. Also with a lot of organizations going to cloud solutions like Google Docs, the office suite is becoming much less important.
I bought it when it was released. It ran like crap.