Hacker News Reader

Comment by dpvan | Hacker News Reader

During the 4.X and 5.X era at WP, the company paid very close attention to the needs of the legal market and WP could do things with a couple of keystrokes that would take 10 minutes with MS Word.

WP also had a potent macro capability and a good macro editor as well. I was practicing law at this time and had created 80-99 WP macros that made legal docs appear like magic.

There was no e-filing and court clerks and judges could be more than a little picky about the formatting of the paper documents they received. If a doc wasn’t formatted in the proper manner, some clerks would refuse to file it and return the doc to the lawyer’s office for a re-do.

View on HN

The acquisition of WP by Novell was a disaster. Way different corporate cultures and leadership styles.

Ashton and Bastian had been generous with stock grants to key people, particularly on the technical side. Most of the key people below the two founders had enough money that they didn’t have to put up with the sharp elbows and confrontational styles that predominated at Novell.

Combine a brain drain with a Microsoft push for Windows and built-in integration with the first passable version of Word and you had a recipe for disaster. Some of the WP people who remained claimed that MS had mislead them about Windows vs DOS roadmap and been slow in providing Windows info necessary for WP engineers to build a decent first release of WP for the new release of Windows, but I could never determine if this was what had really happened or just sour grapes because WP stumbled badly after the ownership change.

It was real. They built their own language and compiler to compile to undocumented windows API calls because MS wouldn't share in the early days while they established a WYSIWYG foothold.

In the corel days they finally decided to port to actual win32 code and put aside the custom transpilation

According to this history written by one of the founders they were given a pre-release copy of Windows to get an early heads up on porting, but the engineers generally preferred to work with DOS:

http://www.wordplace.com/ap/ap_0intro.shtml

Lawyer here. Still miss WP. I could do things in WP in the late 90's that I still can't do in Word.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com