(Forgive me, as I’m spreading in elements from several posters in the this thread, and tossing in a healthy dose of my own opinions and sarcasm)
Oh my. Word Perfect brings back memories. It was pretty terrible but the University Professors ‘required’ we use it, or it was an automatic fail. All that happened again when I went for post graduate work, but then it was ‘Microsoft Office’ that we were ‘forced’ to use (could not even use OpenOffice and save in a doc format…they’d check the file headers somehow and FAIL you if you tried it).
And someone earlier in the thread mentioned cults. For 30 years a lot of of us ‘losers with toy game consoles that could run at least four different OSes and a dozen or so GUI choices were using Pagestream, Calamus, or even Ventura Publisher (Xerox Era, before Corel took it over) (systems that came with a GUI built in, inexpensive dev tools, and custom graphics and sound chips targeted to consumers in a cheap plastic chassis with a few games in the box…instead of being a big heavy metal box and no software at all, got branded as a mere ‘toy’ in most of the product reviews, and Universities actually BANNED students from using the stuff for ‘real work’)’.
Irony…use something because it’s better, more affordable, WAY more efficient, and um…actually comes with access to affordable DOCUMENTATION and full system specs (perhaps even hardware schematics). You’re in a ‘cult’.
Use the stuff your professor said is REQUIRED or you fail…nah, not a cult at all.
I’ll never understand how in the heck two corps (Apple and Microsoft) managed to sue (win, and block) companies (and individuals) that had been doing really nice GUI stuff (with patents, thousands of employees and code out the yin-yang to PROVE they’d been working on it for decades, and on the books, when those, umm, two ‘special’ CEOs were still in Jr. High. (Xerox, IBM, Digital, Atari, Commodore, Sun, Sparcs, Acorn, Tandy, Texas Instruments, Timex, Coleco, Mattel, and more)
How in the heck did a corp like Xerox manage to fail in proving they’d been doing the GUI thing for a long long time, and should have every right to market software that uses ‘pointing devices’, ‘touch screens’ and more? Well, somehow they did…and it wasn’t long until LAWS forced anyone but Apple and Microsoft to ‘cripple’ their software and go bankrupt while a corrupt media pushed the narrative for 40+ years that anything other than MS or Apple products were ‘cult ware’ and ‘toys’.
Typical review back then: This product was amazing! It was a good experience, did everything we asked it to do, and cost less than a pint of beer! It consumed very little energy. We were able to integrate most of our old hardware into the system without a hitch. We could even change the toner drums at a cost savings ratio of 4:1 over anything else on the market (comes in 4 colors and you can get a full color spread by running the paper through 4 times), and get 600dpi where the others top out at 170dpi, require a card with expensive memory (the ‘toy’ had DMA, a min of 1meg of memory…easy to pop in up to 4meg and the OS could see ANY byte at any given time with a single instruction, unlike the ‘superior’ systems that could only see 256kb, and needed like 4 instruction cycles to get any memory above that first 256k…thus image setters for them had to be a post script computer in their own right)! However…no one is using it this ‘toy’ (because we’re telling people not to use it). No one well ever need more than 72dpi, or color! Who wants or needs color!?! Even though these ‘toy makers’ are proving color image setting can be affordable, we say it’s too expensive because DOS systems aren’t doing it yet! Don’t buy it. It’s a terrible thing. This system is just a ‘toy’. It’s made of PLASTIC (very efficient, low energy mass production process), and only takes up a little space on our lab bench (instead of 8 industrial rack spaces)! We conclude that this system is just a ‘toy’, so don’t touch it. Go buy this DOS and fledgling Windows stuff instead. Everyone is using it. If your company has a little extra money, you ‘might’ consider getting the CEO and his/her top pets a ‘cool Macintosh’ (even though it kind of sucks, has the most LIMITED software library of anything else on the entire market, and the disk drive will break every 3 weeks…but we say it’s cool, and executives like to look cool).
Those were all rather impressive, full WYSIWYG systems, with great graphical user interfaces when stuff like ‘PC Magazine’ was advising enterprise level sysops not to waste money on mice or other pointing devices. (What they weren’t telling us, was that it would be another 10 years before the ‘industrial’ hardware they were hawking would even have acceptable latency times for a real time pointing device like a mouse (the toys were doing it rather well, and for a fraction of the cost to end users)…they’d tried and it was a terrible experience…so they panned the mouse and called it a ‘toy not fit for real work’ until they could actually build a machine that the cursor could keep up with a human’s hand movements). So…the ‘toy makers’ got sued, harassed, and marketed into oblivion, and the few companies still standing crafted a great big monopoly, and stalled progress quite a bit. They called it ‘standardizing the industry’. After all, if there is only ONE way to do something, and everything thinks and works the same…the world will be a better place. Right? Well, it might make a little sense, I mean things like ISO and ANSI standards to help people and machines communicate…but…they intentionally break it all every two years, pull support on things once everyone is finally using it and has it working right…so everyone has to start from scratch at least once per decade now anyway.
To this day, that sub $100 copy of Pagestream (that you don’t have to cough up your credit card and way too much money to keep using for as long as you like) can run circles around anything Adobe is pushing in so many ways. Don’t go near it though…or you’re just part of a cult! sarcasm