Re: Mildly OT: dBASE IV

Tony D wrote:
> Alvin wrote :
>
> > Wordperfect was simlar. Once the leader but too slow to market with
> > their windows version, again MS-Word wasn't perfect either but at least
> > it was there.
>
> I think there were a couple of problems with WordPerfect for Windows
> (having been unfortunate enough to use the bl**dy thing myself). The
> first problem was that it was an awful piece of software - big, clunky,
> and slow. Using WPWin on a machine with 2Mb of memory was interesting
> stress test of the hard disk. Anything else that may have happened
> (like, typing) was a bonus.
>
> But the big selling point of WP was the printer drivers. The printer
> drivers for WP in the pre-Windows days were far better than anything
> else available, and printer manufacturers were keen to provide new WP

Yeah good point, I forgot about that, they were good.

> drivers for new models. When Windows 3 splashed down, with something
> approaching a common printer configuration for all apps, it became an
> additional effort to support WPWin that the manufacturers weren't keen
> on. So, almost at a stroke, WPWin lost the big advantage WP had had
> over the rest. WPWin's own intrinsic problems then did the rest.
>
> Do I sound like I hated WPWin ? That's good, because I did !
>

Ha ha ha, know what you mean, it encouraged me to look elsewhere too, I found MS-Word 2.

Mind you I must've just missed the storm because Word v1 for Windows had its own nightmare. How do you take 5 years to create a program that should take 3 years? Easy demand to have it in 1 year.

If dbase IV is a case study of "time to market", Word1 is a case study of "excess schedule pressure a good program doth not make". And I think WPWin is just a bad program period.

> - Tony

Cheers. Received on Mon May 29 2006 - 03:35:49 CEST