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Bill Gates Takes the Stand In WordPerfect Trial
Hugh Pickens writes "Remember WorldPerfect? Bill Gates took the witness stand to defend his company against a $1 billion antitrust lawsuit that claims Microsoft duped Novell into thinking he would include WordPerfect in the new Windows system, then backed out because he feared it was too good. Gates testified Monday that Microsoft was racing to put out Windows 95 when he dropped technical features that would no longer support the rival's word processor. He said that in making the decision about the code, he was concerned not about Novell but about one element of the program that could have caused computers to crash. That code, technically known as 'name space extensions,' had to do with the display of folders and files. Novell attorney Jeff Johnson concedes that Microsoft was under no legal obligation to provide advance access to Windows 95 so Novell could prepare a compatible version but contends that Microsoft enticed Novell to work on a version, only to withdraw support months before Windows 95 hit the market. 'We got stabbed in the back.'"
http://groklaw.net/ ; tends to give better in depth coverage with fewer misunderstandings than most other observers of this lawsuit.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Remember WordPerfect? Hell, I'm still using it. I still have an old Toshiba laptop that runs FreeDos and WordPerfect v5.1
Now, get off my lawn you whippersnappers while me and Bill Gates reminisce about the old days
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
"into thinking he would include WordPerfect in the new Windows system" This is WRONG! Novell thought Windows would include some (4) APIs about "name space extensions".
Bill Gates is spending his time and money these days looking for a cure for malaria and other diseases. Taking time away from that to testify in this case = more dead babies. Novell is killing babies.
Is "reminisce" a euphemism for punch in the face?
This is what Microsoft was throughout the late '80s and entire '90s. People today look at Gates and see a great man donating billions to help starving people in Africa. Yes, he is that, but remember how he made those billions. He made them by crushing the rest of the PC software industry using heavy-handed, often blatantly illegal means, from his perch as CEO of a monopoly.
Gates is the modern day John D Rockefeller or Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Namespace extensions are things that let you mess with Windows Explorer and add your own contextual menus and folder layout. How could that sink a word processor? From the user's point of view, are they really not going to buy the word processor because they can't initiate feature X from explorer? I don't even know of any word processor that even has a feature like that, and it's been 15 years since Windows 95 came out.
I don't doubt that MS over-promised on what features the OS would deliver, given that they've done that with every OS release I can recall, but to say that they shelved a viable feature to sink Novell, and that it was actually the cause of Novell going under is a real stretch.
"The company said Gates duped it into thinking he would include its WordPerfect writing program in the new Windows system then backed out because he feared it was too good."
The whole story seems to be about the namespace extensions thing. So where is Novell claiming that MS agreed to bundle WordPerfect with Windows?
I'm curious as to why this is not a contract dispute? I can only assume it is because no contract existed. If they had a contract with Microsoft that stated what the interface was supposed to be then they would be in violation of contract. If there was no contract and MS was just building an OS and told them the interface would be and then decided not to include it or change it there is no case.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I'd save the "clearly not intentional" until after the court's findings. I most certainly wouldn't put it past them, especially not back then.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Show codes.
When you ran into trouble with the way your document was displaying, you could hit show codes and edit the paired tags (a lot like HTML).
No program should ever hide your data so that you cannot directly edit it when the "interpretive" parts of the program guess incorrectly about what you want.
The first and foremost abuse of this is web-based comment fields with little mini-GUIs to help you format your text. When the system "guesses" the wrong bullet point, or line spacing, etc. you can fix the problem in three seconds with a show codes option.
Sadly, many programs and web sites do not do this. They think it's too complicated for their users. While this may be true of the 90%, it's not true for the rest, and they're slowing us down with the simpleton interface.
Grrr.
Futurist Traditionalism
I can still (vaguely) remember the keystrokes for search, indent, blocking (selecting), copying, pasting, etc... for WP5.1 on DOS.. That was the best word processor I have ever used... I have a difficult time doing indents in Word even today.... Sadly, WP's user base for it has shrunk since Windows took over DOS.... I missed the Reveal Codes badly.. That's the feature that no other word processing software is able to replicate...
" ... only to withdraw support months before Windows 95 hit the market."
Its a risk that comes with business venture!
I think Novell is just grasping for straws. They are a dying company and have been fading out for quite sometime. I work at a large software company and out of all our customers only 2 use Novell and both plan to migrate off of it in the next few years because of compatibility issues with API calls and lack of support. Microsoft nor any company is required to make their system compatible with your software, that is your job as a software developer.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Nothing like having a defunct company bring a lawsuit 10 years after the fact, never settle, and force a trial over 15 years later. Not because Novell wasn't cool or anything, but they did manage to lose every single market advantage they had year over year until they died. Must have been some other company's fault.
Very happy to see this judge refuse to throw this one out and make sure we all get to read about him in the press every day.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I have been a fan of WordPerfect for many years. I liked how it was ported to many platforms (eg. Amiga). I liked the reveal codes and macros. Some of the keystrokes were a bit obscure, but you got used to them.
But the features of the software were its downfall when it came to a Windows version. Their keyboard shortcuts directly conflicted with that used by Windows, and their massive library of printer drivers were superceded by the Windows drivers. But the biggest problem was the delay in getting a Windows 3.1 version out, and how buggy it was. They can't blame missing features in Windows 95 for that. They went 3 or 4 years before they finally came out with a non-sucky version (WPWin 5.1 to 6.0a). Even the DOS version of 6.0 was buggy - I seem to recall that they had to release a version 5.2 AFTER 6.0 was out.
When they finally did come out with a Win95 version, it would not run on Windows NT. With such a history of poor releases, it doesn't seem to unreasonable to believe that any problems that they had were of their own making.
No.. all programs and web sites do this.
It's called a hex editor.
Now, that may be too complicated for 90% of the techies, but it's not true for the rest of us, and you're slowing us down with the simpleton demands for ASCII-editable interfaces.
Can someone care to enlighten me as to how not implementing these API into Windows back in the day could cause a $1 billion loss for WordPerfect? Or did "Name Space Extensions" mean something else back then? I just don't see how this relates to word processors, and the article even seems to confirm that suspicion with Bill Gates saying the feature didn't have word processors in mind.
I duno how much Microsoft really had to do with it, but it seemed like WordPerfect really screwed themselves with poor quality software and service.
The original release of WordPerfect 7 ONLY ran on Windows 95 (Not at all on under NT), was late to to release, and was not very stable. They later produced an update of WP 7 that was more stable and ran on NT 3.51/4.0 but the only way to get that was to order a new CD. No downloadable update patches for you!
WP 7 for Windows 3.1 was just a rebadged version of the 16-bit WP 6.1.
Then they pulled the same trick with WordPerfect 8. Initially buggy and updates required obtaining a new CD.
To this day there is still an option to turn off the "enhanced" open/save dialog because it is buggy and crashes under odd environments - especially under Wine.
It also didn't help that at the time it was switching ownership left and right. WordPerfect corp? Novel? Corel? Good way to destroy confidence in a product.
One of the three members of the trio who ran WordPerfect corporation, Pete Petersen, wrote a detailed book about the WordPerfect saga called Almost Perfect. Go read it now, it's a fascinating tale of a once-great company so busy shooting itself in the foot that it hasn't noticed that it's going down the tubes. WordPerfect Corp was doing such a good job of committing suicide that it really didn't need any help from Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter.
"He said that in making the decision about the code, he was concerned not about Novell but about one element of the program that could have caused computers to crash."
Out of the jabillion things that made 95 crash, he just happened to focus on the one thing that was not in-house?
Not that Novell is looking any better.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
because I can think of hundreds of people rich or not who would be more in line for such a description of their activities, trouble is most are politicians and the like who apparently always get off free.
Frankly if Gates was nasty evil then Satan was a choir boy.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Wouldn't it be great if the minutes from the hearing were typed up in OpenOffice :)
Summation 2
Wordperfect? Windows 95? What decade are we talking about here? Not only have the horses left the barn, they have established a healthy feral population.
You're lucky. I didn't use WordPerfect, but used Multimate instead. Now, I have a bunch of Multimate documents that can't be converted into Word or OpenDocument formats.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Show codes.
When you ran into trouble with the way your document was displaying, you could hit show codes and edit the paired tags (a lot like HTML).
No program should ever hide your data so that you cannot directly edit it when the "interpretive" parts of the program guess incorrectly about what you want.
The first and foremost abuse of this is web-based comment fields with little mini-GUIs to help you format your text. When the system "guesses" the wrong bullet point, or line spacing, etc. you can fix the problem in three seconds with a show codes option.
Sadly, many programs and web sites do not do this. They think it's too complicated for their users. While this may be true of the 90%, it's not true for the rest, and they're slowing us down with the simpleton interface.
Grrr.
I agree with you that Reveal Codes is a extremely helpful feature that is or should be standard on almost all current WordProcessing software. As someone who supports the 90% and 10% of WordPerfect Reveal Codes users, I can safely assume that this feature was not born out of innovation but necessity. I've been "fortunate" to support users using WordPerfect since WP8 and it is a notoriously buggy program that has trouble handling WP codes present in documents from older versions hence the birth of reveal codes. At best Reveal Codes is a great feature to find a bad code present in page 2 that crashes a document whenever you scroll past page 9 but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a "hack" created by the programmers that made it into production as a feature.
So, go use LaTeX then.
Well, I guess if you want to pick a beef you might as well go for it. One more question, am I the only person who never had Windows 95 blow up on them? I mean, going to 98 was a heck of a lot smoother, but I never had any problems with '95.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
My first Linux was not for coding or server or e-penis, it was to keep the fucking music playing while Windows did one of its routine crashes. The crashes I had learned to live with but the music constantly interrupting because of it I had not.
Then I learned of course that on Linux you could keep a browser open. Just open. You know, open. Where you left it and come back to it and not found the system had crashes and lost all your search history.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Didn't Multimate support exporting to RTF (at least DOS RTF)?
Steve Jobs did found the Steven P. Jobs Foundation shortly after being forced out of Apple, but it went away when he chose to focus on NeXT instead.
More importantly, he did get California's DMV to force the question of organ donation, hugely increasing the number of potential donors, something which is saving lots of lives and making many more better and longer.
I don't see that his personal income tax statements were public, so no idea on how much he personally donated.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Windows 95 came out what - 15/16 years ago??? WTF?
Either way, unless there is some sort of tengible evidence beyond heresay proving that Microsoft had serious intentions to bundle WP, I don't think Novell will get anywhere here. Even then, Microsoft can tell any number of wendors or 3rd parties it intends to bundle a certain app or piece of functionality in, that doesn't make it true. This is generally why you sign contracts and letters of intention. I can remember lots of features in Windows OS's that were purported to make it in, and never did. Vista was originally supposed to have WinFS.
I suspect the majority of us working in deploying word processing environments at the time would tell you: WordPerfect was the better word processor; Word had better, prettier Windows integration. The integration, along with bundled "Works" versions, pushed the market to Word.
Surely this suit requires Novell to prove that Microsoft mislead them with the intention of causing them to lose market share. Unless there's a smoking gun I'm not seeing, how do they plan to achieve this? We can't punish Microsoft for not including a feature they weren't obligated to implement. If we can, I want to sue them for not providing an API that enables me to torture that damned paperclip.
linux unfortunately began its victory run in 96, so it was still geekware.
On the other hand, sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Really, stop caring stupid lawyers. The problem is Judges are lawyers too at heart and they deign to listen to this CRAP from the PAST. If judges were ... I dunno lawn care workers, they would appropriately not give a shit about something that happened so long ago.
At that time I had a Slackware Linux system in my office that was running for a straight 657 days until I stopped it to put in another disk drive and it ran for another 285 days until I stopped it again to move offices.. The Win95 box that the university insisted I use because of Excell and Word only crashed when I typed on it. I had to shut it down almost every day. If I didn't, it reminded me.
I feel for them. Unfortunately, no matter who won the OS war (IBM or Microsoft) they were screwed. IBM bought Ami, IMHO, making Lotus Suite the best of all worlds. It was definitely the siznit on Warp. People developing for Windows were getting fucked left and right which made me wonder why anybody bothered developing for them. It was no secret most secretaries lived, breathed, and loved WordPerfect. Most of the legal secretaries I worked with loved Apple too. Enough so I would bet that Apple and WordPerfect could have been the ipso facto standard of the Legal world. I guess the numbers were not big enough for Novell. Oh well. Hindsight, 20/20, and all that.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Wikipedia has found the opposite; people don't understand 'show codes' and want a formatting text area and toolbar. Maybe that would be different today if WP had been available on Windows 95.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
I was a huge WordPerfect DOS fan it was the best wordprocessor and interface was most intuitive I've ever seen. Then they tried to make a Mac version SUCKED horriblily and if I remember they killed the product and restarted and killed again. Then they tried to do a Windows version and it was so-so at best and it died a slow death. Their problem wasn't MS it was they never successfully make the transition from a DOS text to GUI platform.
Maybe they should sue Apple too for their problems.
Yes yes but you couldn't play need for speed 2 or duke nukem + linux GUIs were primitive to put it nicely and the install was the equivalent of a college sophomore level IT course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
Note: the wikipedia article is not very accurate, pertinent inaccuracy being that the AARD code did ship with release versions of W3.1 /sarcasm/ No, Bill Gates, and Microsoft would NEVER intentionally sabotage another business! It was ALWAYS accidental! /sarcasm/
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I played a lot of Quake and Tribes on my Linux box. Morrowind worked through wine. Getting 3D working and keeping it working is more effort than raising a toddler. That's true to this very day!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yes it did, I can attest to that.
Remember, X on Linux was not the same X on other Unixes, it was XFree86.
Bugs were being fixed from the original code line, X386 (X11-R5)
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Seriously? SERIOUSLY? Did you even TRY?
Is it on a hard disk, or readable disk of some sort? If yes, then the text can be extracted. This APPLIES TO ANY FILE FORMAT.
The one you are talking about can be converted with Office 97, StarOffice, sever places online.
If only there where a bunch of computers the hooked together some how that shared a common protocol and you could search them some how. Ah to dream.
.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
My ex-wife got my copy in the divorce. No matter, I'm running Linux almost exclusively anyway (haven't installed it on the notebook yet). But it was a damned good word processor. We have Word at work, and I hate it. I especially hate not having a "reveal codes" feature.
Free Martian Whores!
Dear mods - Not Troll, Fucking hilarious.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Save them as text files, import them into Word or ODF, then reformat the docs.
Free Martian Whores!
I always figured Microsoft was at odds with itself. On one side, you have an operating system company that needs to recruit 3rd parties to write applications for their OS. On the other hand, you have an application company that needs to prevent 3rd parties from producing better software than you. Novel needed to trust Microsoft as their OS vendor. It has to be a weird situation to depend on your biggest competitor to deliver a stable platform that runs your software.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
"Reveal Codes" has been a feature of WordPerfect from the beginning, way back in the DOS days when you couldn't do WYSIWYG wordprocessing. Back then, all you could do was underline, italicise, or bold characters onscreen, so another method was needed to do all the fancy page layout. Since WP used SGML right from the getgo, it was simple to just show the SGML tags (aka "Reveal Codes").
The other big feature of WordPerfect was "Make it Fit". That feature helped me a lot in high school and university. Take a 3.5 page document and stretch it out to 5 pages without making it too obvious. Or take a 6 page doc and shrink it down to 5 pages. Wonderful feature.
The other really big feature of WordPerfect was file format compatibility, both forward and backward. You can open WP for DOS files in WP for Windows without any issues. You can open WP 14 files in WP 9 without installing anything extra. The whole SGML document format was so far ahead of its time (ODT is a poor bastardisation of it using XML).
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was an awesome app.
WordPerfect 6-8 for Windows weren't that great.
WordPerfect 9 (aka 2000) was awesome, and was "ported" over to Linux as well (although it used a private WINE install to do it)
Never used WordPerfect 10-12.
Tried WordPerfect 13/14, and they were ok.
Even though I haven't touched WordPerfect in many years, I still miss it everytime I use Open/LibreOffice. And I always cringe anytime I have to use MS Word and do any kind of formatting.
Is "reminisce" a euphemism for pie in the face?
Fixed.
Hello, text files!
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
It is still around, btw, and if *any* owner had had a marketing dept. capable of marketing their way out of a wet paper bag even with the help of the Terminator, Word would be the tiny niche piece of crap it should be. WP was *vastly* better, and through the nineties, contracts were still being written that documentation was *required* to be in WP format, not Word.
Hell, every single web page generator, including Dirt, er, Word, and OpenOffice, when you export as HTML, *suck*. Old WP had F3, reveal *all* codes (unlike Word, which only shows what it thinks you have a need to know), and one look at that format, and you'd see they could have exported as *perfect* HTML.
Wish M$ hadn't bought part of the company owning it about 10 years ago, and stopped the Linux releases that had already started: I'd still be using it, hell, I'd *pay* for a legal copy.
mark "and if you haven't used it, then you don't know jack to compare with, so shut up"
Unfortunately, while I still have the Multimate files, I don't have Multimate itself. So I need to find some program that can translate them into a more modern file format (or just spit out the plain text).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I no longer have Multimate. Just the files I wrote awhile back when I used the program. Ii haven't been able to find any program that can read these files.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Yes, I have tried. Office and Openoffice don't recognize the file format. I'm not too comfortable about submitting my documents to random websites for "conversion." (Especially if all I know about the website is that it comes up in a Google search.)
Notepad does allow me to open them and view some of the text, but it is very garbled. Some text is missing, chunks of text are placed in various different sections, and much of the "text" are characters that don't make any sense (which, of course, comes from Notepad's inability to properly render the Multimate file format). I was only able to recreate one document via Notepad's rendering.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Not all old rich guys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
Is word perfect even alive? It was always a terrible program that I had no interest in using.
After all they built windows to crash on purpose for DR DOS
It may seem like a feature, but imho it was just a way to fix bugginess in WP.. I used to support both WinWord and WP 5.x. At least with Word, the major brain freeze was just how much was wrapped up into the "last paragraph" mark in a document, and to a lesser extent, the other paragraph marks. The UI actually did show how things were. Since hardly anyone really used section breaks or styles in practice, that wasn't a big one, either.
As far as more complicated stuff, (e.g., page layout), that's what PageMaker was for.
The biggest problem I had was how people formatted (and still do...) their documents to print on their home printers, and then would bring to the computer lab to print on the laser printer. They'd be troubled, to say the least, when their carefully "formatted" tables, etc. (they'd used tabs & spaces) would go all askew when printed on our printers, or when they changed typefaces, etc.
But WP could seriously hork up its documents. While it was kind of nice to see the guts, it was kind of like editing raw HTML. I never could really see the fascination with Reveal Codes. At least, I guess, if things were bad enough, you could go through a document and just reduce it to an unformatted (short of paragraph breaks) blob, but it probably would be just as fast to save it to a text file, too, to start over. Some of the things I remember seeing were a normal-looking line of text when printed out, but reveal codes revealed all sorts of nested, cancelling out formatting tags. It wasn't noticed until another formatting change was applied, and it totally upset the applecart, so some spelunking in Reveal Codes became necessary to clean up the internal mess.
That, and managing printer setup strings in WP... I suppose that was one of those "elite" things I was happy to not deal with ever again after Windows 3.x. That people *still* hold onto WP boggles me.
My first Linux was not for coding or server or e-penis, it was to keep the fucking music playing .
I guess you had one of those few soundcards that were actually working with alsa? In those days, getting sound to work was half the fun (the other half was guessing if clipboard would work when trying to copy stuff from one application to another in KDE).
lucm, indeed.
Wow! The subject of the article made it feel like 1999 again. Glad to see our swift, efficient justice system is on the ball.
I worked for WaldenSoftware when the shift went from Word Perfect to Word.
Microsoft offered a competitive upgrade to their entire office suite for $129, which essentially everyone qualified for. WordPerfect for Windows was pretty good, not as good as Word for Windows but Word Perfect was at that point the better Word processor. They finally paired up with Borland to offer QuatroPro/Paradox/Word/Harvard Graphics. But for about a year they were more expensive than Word (effectively) and AmiPro was arguably the best. The Suite (Lotus 1-2-3, Ami Pro word processor...)
Show Codes is the reason WordPerfect sucked. It was easy to accidentally delete an invisible end tag, and then the entire formatting of your document would be fucked. So you were pretty much forced to reveal the codes and tediously edit around them, which is suckwork for nerds.
I'm perfectly capable of marking-up HTML, but who wants to deal with that shit while you're writing.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The original poster was being sarcastic ...
Older versions of StarOffice did have import filters for Multimate.
So you could do :
Multimate -> StarOffice -> LibreOffice.
Or you could try to torrent a version of multimate.
Not really legal, but I doubt whoever own the right now (wikipedia say they were bought by Borland) is going to track you and sue you for fetching a 30 year old software you use to access old documents.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It's called "business".
Sadly, but truly, you always have to be prepared for a stab in the back on business. If you don't do a proper study of your field and partners, you are not doing your job.
I mean. It's Microsoft. How can you not expect something like that?
"That part is true, but it only affected some computers (anecdotally, about half). It appears to be at root a bug in the timer chip on the motherboard, which in turn tickled a bug in Win9x. Hardware that lacked the bug would NOT crash at the 49 day mark". by Reziac
Is this billg talking, cause he's also able to selectively distort the historical record when it suits him too.
" Symptoms: After 49.7 days of continuous operation, your Windows-based computer may stop responding (hang).
Cause: There is a problem with the timing algorithm in the Vtdapi.vxd file.
Resolution: For Windows 95, For Windows 98" link
The windows client uses the API call GetTickCount() to get the current uptime. The value returned by that function can't be larger than 49.7 because elapsed time is stored as a DWORD value.
"Air Traffic radio control system crashes every 49.7 days"
The lack of availability of 1 feature won't sink an entire company.
BUT, "pulling the rug" under Novell's feet at the last moment like Microsoft did, means that Novell has spent ressource (time, money, etc.) developping something in vain because it won't work anymore.
And even if the features aren't mission critical (a word processor could theoritally still work, without the advanced fancy virtual folders), Novell are left with a product that is late in its development cycle, but that can't work in its current shape, and which will require more development to adapt (even if it means cutting out all the namespace-dependant modules) and more qa, etc.
So Novell need to spend even more ressources, and the release of the word processor is delayed.
So, all in all, Novell did lose a lot of money and opportunities in this process. This API change didn't per se kill them, but it did cost them a lot. Now the question is: did Microsoft do this intentionnally, luring Novell into wasting time, ressources and opportunities ? or was it an unintended collateral damage of their development process?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
and I can't find the word asshole. I can only assume you are all fans.
I think his experience predates both ALSA and KDE.
Way-back-then, the kernel's own OSS drivers generally just worked unless if you had something particularly strange or wanted to do unusual things with it, in which case 4front would be pleased to sell you inexpensive drivers (with human support).
My own experience was similar: Windows 95, for whatever reason, had a terrible time playing music -- FFS, it'd slow to a crawl just by copying a floppy disk. OS/2 did OK in that it at least multitasked properly, but had other limitations that I didn't like. Linux just worked: It played music reliably and predictably.
(Incidentally, I now use 7 on my desktop for exactly the same reasons.)
Kid-proof tablet..
Pretty much everything of the time opened multimate files. Just find something like an old copy of Word or Wordperfect, get the appropriate filter and import. Then import with a newer version. I managed to google things like dataviz which costs money but does it directly.
Apple has a long an glorious history of competing with their developers. I use Windows all the time and frankly, I just don't see features that are included for free in Windows which are not actually OS related things.
1) You can think of the After Dark/Screen Saver thing
Screen savers were going to be part of Windows someday... AfterDark could have adapted their executables to fit into the API... get over it.
2) You can think of Winzip
Unzipping is easy in stock windows... still need a third part app for zipping.
3) You can think of Nero
The crappy, limited CD/DVD burning that is part of Windows is pretty bare bones. Though, if you think Microsoft should have left it out... so be it. Frankly, it's a mute point now anyway as CD/DVD is dead.
4) You can think of media players
Um... yeh, cause people actually use Windows Media player
5) You can think of video and DVD editors
Just don't.
6) You can think of mail programs
Yeh... Windows Live Mail sucks less than many these days... took 15 years.
7) You can think of web browsers
If people still use IE... kudos to them... man... those people really have endurance.
8) Antivirus tools
Really? You think Microsoft shouldn't put their own in as standard when nearly all the 3rd party antivirus tools are as bad as the viruses themselves? Twice in the past month or two I got infected by Norton Security Scan from programs I installed. I actually convinced my wife's IT boss at her company to switch 800 computers in their organization from Symantec to Microsoft's tools because you can't trust a company that behaves like that. McAfee is nearly as bad these days... Adobe makes it an opt out instead of opt-in option.
Yeh... pretty much covered all the programs that are included with Windows... if you want more, you'll have to pay for them. So what are you actually getting at?
Oh... you probably mean that Linux distros are better... you know the ones that have about 60 different clones of every program ever commercially produced.
You're 100% right... it just took an amazingly huge amount for someone to get to the point. They could have easily recompiled without that feature and altered the installer and everything would have been fine in a week or two. In fact, they probably did. But let's look at the real fact of this.
Word for Windows was the slowest program EVER MADE. I mean... HOLY SHIT it was slow. I remember typing and waiting for keystrokes to show up seconds later...
That was also during the dark era of computers when EISA quadrupled the price of computers, Intel didn't make chipsets and only Micron made a good chipset and when all the other motherboards cost $50-$75, a Micron motherboard cost $350. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of RAM manufacturers too.. unless you were willing to pay triple or more to Kingston, RAM was crap. I remember running memory tests while burning in computers for 12 hours in a run and almost always needing to replace the memory. The reason for this was that AMD and Cyrix started shipping chips with 40Mhz front side buses and Intel had the nerve to ship a 50Mhz front side bus. This was a major problem since we hadn't yet learned how to resolve the wave reflection issues that occurred at more than 33Mhz. So 99% of the motherboards, RAM, CPUs and others that were shipped during that era SUCKED BALLS!!!! VESA Local Bus made it 100x worse since even at 33Mhz, it was highly unreliable. Computers just really really sucked at the time. Let's also add that S3 has still not released the first consumer Windows graphics accelerators, so the pathetic 33-66Mhz 486 based computers at the time (most without math coprocessors) couldn't handle simply moving Windows around the screen without making life suck. To be brief, it wasn't until Intel had designed the 440BX chipset for use with the Pentium II and most of the crap RAM manufacturers died that the PC really began to be great.
Wordperfect however refused to believe that Windows would ever amount to anything... so instead of writing a Windows version, they released WordPerfect 5.2 and sad on their thumbs for a long ass time. When they released WordPerfect 5.2 for Windows, it was the biggest half assed hack ever produced from a big company like them. For years after, WordPerfect got better in increments of "This release sucks less than the previous". By the time Windows 95 came out... Microsoft had already released Word 6.0 and it was great (though slow for reasons mentioned earlier) and on the day of releasing Windows 95, they released Word 95 and at that point Wordperfect was better known as "Wordperfect who?".
The Windows 95 release WAS NOT!!! by any means the death of WordPerfect. Windows 3.0 was... and it wasn't Microsoft's fault. When Microsoft ported rewrote for Windows, WordPerfect should have as well.
You could say "Windows was a big gamble.. if people wanted Windows, they could buy Mac". Or "Windows was too complicated to program for since Visual C++ hadn't been released until way after Windows 3.0 and no one had a clue how to program for it". Or "Turbo C++ cost $99 per developer and Microsoft C/C++ 7.0 cost $495 with the Windows SDK, 50 copies and the training involved would have been a mess". Or "Windows SDK was SOOOO awful (still is) that writing anything useful in it without first spending months wrapping the SDK in something usable would have been impossible".... all of these things would be right... but Word had a HUGE head start on WordPerfect and when Windows 3.1 was released, for the first time, nearly everyone had at least a 386SX and could run it and the world rushed out and bought/pirated the hell out of it.
In fact, if Windows 3.1 had copy protection on it... the world would have been much different. It was almost entirely because of how easy it was to pirate that Windows 3.1 ended up on nearly every PC able to run it practically overnight.
WordPerfect was a joke.... their product was crap and by 1995... they just weren't relevant anymore.... OH... and as a final nail in the coffin.... Word for Windows did a slightly better job opening WordPerfect 5.1 files than WordPerfect did in their own Windows version.
I remember many guys that would stubbornly hold on to DOS, and one huge reason was the lack of stability in Windows 95.
For quite a while, I used a personal stripped-down version of Win95 (that was the time when you had a chance of knowing the purpose of every single file on your harddrive) with "shell=4dos.com". It was faster and more stable than vanilla DOS and DESQview, and with the additional benefit of being able to run the few win32 programs I used. Pretty darn solid, as long as I didn't memcpy to nullptrs.
Coffee-driven development.
On the box it says "Corel WordPerfect8 for Linux". When loaded it uses native linux libraries.
Uhh.. ctrl-alt-backspace killed X, and restarted it. That's like saying that ctrl-alt-del cured windows.
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And this is different from Word, OpenOffice, KOffice, etc how exactly? At least with WP you know which formatting tag was deleted and can easily repair it. With Word, delete the wrong space and you can lose formatting for the word, the paragraph, the page, or even the whole document.