Comment by Fwirt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fwirt | Hacker News Reader

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Fun story: My wife's grandfather was a salesman for WordPerfect back in the 1980s. He passed away roughly 15 years ago, but her grandmother still had a bunch of his stuff above her garage. When we were cleaning it out a couple years ago we found boxed/sealed sample copies of WordPerfect for every platform (Tandy/Apple II/DOS/etc.) all the way from the days when it was still published by SSI Software (version 1.x) up though 6.0 or so. There were also some dead-ended WordPerfect products (MathPerfect?), a bunch of branded WordPerfect conference swag (WordPerfect pocket calculators/mousepads/folios/etc.) and I think a couple quarterly sales reports and recruiting pamphlets. I tried to see if various computing museums wanted it, but nobody would take it. As far as I know it's still all sitting in a shed at my in-laws, can anybody think of something to do with it? It's ultimately destined for the dumpster, a younger me would have been appalled but at this point in my life I don't have the energy to worry about the detritus of a bygone corporation.

Ask the Internet Archive if they want them.

This, contact Jason Scott (@Textfiles on Twitter, www.textfiles.com) and he'll probably hook you up with someone in a matter of 24 hours.

I would guess they would sell pretty fast on eBay, and likely to someone that would appreciate them.

The calculators sold pretty well, but the boxed software is pretty heavy and only appeals to a very specific audience. I think I found a few examples of auctions that ended without a single bid and figured it wasn't worth the trouble. I would be surprised if got many bids, but I guess I could give it a shot.

Maybe a lot of effort for little reward here, but you could always try contacting someone like LGR[1] and offer to send some for the purposes of making a video to show some of them off being unboxed and then used on their original hardware. In some senses, that might be about as good as sending it to a museum!

1 - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLx053rWZxCiYWsBETgdKrQ

I collect boxed software. I wasn't aware of your auction. In some ways auctions work against a product like this because this is an impulse buy now item. I would repost an auction now that hw is aware.

I'd hit up Jason Scott, textfiles.com or twitter.com/textfiles.

I might be interested. Definitely consider posting some of this on eBay and I'd be happy to give it a look. :)

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