The original WordStar for CP/M was written in Z-80 assembly language by Rob
Barnaby, in about a month. He was the principle coder on it until the last
release prior to 4.0. When he left the company is when thing started to go
downhill for MicroPro. WordStar for DOS used slow DOS system functions for the
keyboard and display and lagged way behind on supporting subdirectories.
WordPerfect for DOS was written in 8088 assembly.
Corel was a poor steward of WordPerfect. They dropped the Macintosh version at
3.5e. The last Windows version released by Corel was horrible. I tried doing an
HTML document once. I had things all laid out and saved it. The document opened
OK in a web browser. I reloaded it into WP, made some changes and saved it.
Checked it again in a browser and it was all screwed up. Reloaded into WP and
it was bad there too. If you could do 100% of everything in HTML in one go with
that version of WP for Windows, it was fine, but it couldn't re-open and
re-save HTML that it was used to create.
Microsoft had Word for Mac before they came out with a Windows version, so were
ahead of the competition when it came to a GUI word processor.
On Monday, April 24, 2017, 9:29:48 AM MDT, dmccunney
<dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote:On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 11:14 AM, Dale E
Sterner <sunbeam...@juno.com> wrote:
> I think there must have been a 5.5 otherwise you wouldn't
> have a 5.6.
The problem for both products was failure to keep up with the market.
Micropro took its eye off the WordStar ball and attempted to
diversify. WordPerfect ate them for lunch. Word Perfect waited too
long to develop a Windows version. By the time they did, MS Word
owned the word processing market.
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