WordPerfect, Office 12 and a trip down software memory lane

CNET News: Corel on Tuesday announced an updated version of WordPerfect Office, its rival to Microsoft's dominant Office suite.

This news item triggered some synapses to take a short trip down software memory lane, so here goes.

I've been using Microsoft Word for over twelve years now, from version 6 when it was called 'Word 6 for Windows' to differentiate it from the DOS version. I beta-tested Word for Windows 95 and have moved with the various versions in the ensuing years to today's 2003 version as part of the latest Microsoft Office suite. Beta tested that, too, prior to release. (Good history of Word on Wikipedia, if that interests you.)

Before Word, I was a devoted user of Ami Pro, originally published by Samna and then by Lotus when they acquired Samna (and Lotus was subsequently acquired by IBM). Terrific application. But it didn't move with the times among other things. Before that, it was WordPerfect, specifically version 5.1 for DOS which was arguably the dominant word processor (that description sounds quaint today, doesn't it?) in the late 80s and early 90s. At least, that's what every company I knew was using.

Prior to WordPerfect, I was a WordStar diehard from waaaay back in the days of CP/M. That's another story, though. There's a great history of WordStar on Wikipedia.

Tucked away in my attic are boxes of museum-grade software from the early and pioneerings days of the IBM PC (remember the phrase 'IBM-compatible computer'?), which takes in just about all the 1980s especially the early part of that decade.

Original disks, most of them 1.2-meg floppies, even some 360k ones. Utilities galore. Desktop publishing (Ventura Publisher 1.0 that ran on DOS and had a GEM run-time; about 20 disks which meant quite a lengthy performance at installation time). Word processors (Lotus Ami Pro 3.0). Thinking about Lotus, I've got first versions of Magellan and Agenda, the first a DOS-based disk and file organizer/navigator, the latter a pretty powerful DOS-based contact management and calendar system.

I really ought to inventory all this stuff some day, if the disks haven't degraded over time to be beyond any use.

Anyway, end of brief trip down memory lane and to the primary point of this post (yes, I do have a point here). From CNet's story again about the new WordPerfect Office:

[...] The new program, Corel WordPerfect Office X3, adds the ability to import and export its files to Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). The software also has a new interface and promises better support for multilingual characters and an easy way to strip out hidden information, or metadata, from a file.

Now that's a useful feature - export to PDF. Whatever you think of PDFs, they're still in widespread use in many companies. I have Adobe Acrobat 5.5, the full version not the free Reader. I used it occasionally and I've seen absolutely no reason to upgrade. Yet if all you want to do is create a simple PDF, buying the full Acrobat product whatever the version is a pricey option.

I no longer have Acrobat installed on my PC as I have a solution which I've been using for the past six months or so - Open Office. Now in version 2, this free office suite includes a PDF export option. So for instance, I can open a Word doc in Open Office and output it as a PDF. Works perfectly every time.

Office 12 will have "save as PDF" as an option, so if that's a major USP for Corel, it won't be a USP for long.

[...] [Corel's] move comes ahead of Microsoft's introduction later this year of Office 12, the next version of its suite, which features a significantly revamped user interface and new file formats. Microsoft launched a limited beta of the software last year and plans a broader test version in the second quarter of 2006.

Sorry, Corel, even without reading anyone's reviews about your new offering, my money's on Office 12. Here's one reason. And here's another.

Amazing what a trip down memory lane will get you blogging about.