[ExI] Weird new way to do physics

[Stefano Vaj]

On 27 November 2011 20:23, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:

> As Stefano pointed out, the human interface to the first version of
> WordPerfect was also flawed. This was because of two things. The power
> of the "shared code" group that insisted that the Windows port use
> large parts of the DOS program, and that they got a late start because
> of the wish of Pete Peterson to punish Microsoft. There were a lot of
> late nights over there when they finally figured out that Windows was
> going to be relevant, and that OS/2 was going the way of the dodo.
>

Any OS/2 PM version would suffer from the same probs as the Windows one: in
such a change of paradigm only a marginal edge remained with regard to
existing Wordperfect users.

As to the "flawed" interface, I never liked it much, but given the number
of its fanatical followers I would not not be so adamant, and personally I
am a mourner of Wordstar, and kept using under OS/2 and Windows its DOS
version - certainly not the Windows version, suffering from the same probs
as Wordperfect for Windows or for Macintosh - as long as I could.
Basically, such things had a much steeper learning curves for casual users
and newcomers, but allowed a much more effective and extended and seemless
control to those used to them. Word is horribly clumsy, and only its
ill-deserved popularity can hide that. Another example of market failure...
:-)

I assume I should have switched to LaTex or something like that to keep a
similar experience, but my life was made simpler by adopting first Lotus
WordPro for OS/2 and then Staroffice/Openoffice.org/Libreoffice, under OS/2
first and then for Linux.

By the way, Corel is still making money out of the Wordperfect suite, even
though what made it popular especially in law firms is by now largely gone
in favour of a more extended compliance with Windows standards.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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