We were, however, a company founded and owned by programmers, where programmers were treated with an extra measure of respect. It was somewhat unusual for a software company to let the programmers decide the future of its products. Some of the issues were very complicated, so by the time the arguments were finished and a decision was made, I usually had a headache. At times the three of us on the Board had to assume the role of referee. These decisions were made by the programmers, who sometimes had very heated discussions about what was needed. We spent a lot of time in meetings going over what had to be in the product and how things should work. 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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