How old is WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS?

[Bulk Beef]

Anybody know when it was released?

And for the IT guys out there, what the oldest app you're expected to support?

 

[speed01]

I think it was released around '89 or '90.

Speed

 

[EagleKeeper]

I have an application which I wrote, still in use for 3.11

 

[Rio Rebel]

I believe it would be 1993. I bought it when it first came out in my second year of graduate school, which I believe was 1993.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Originally posted by: Rio Rebel
I believe it would be 1993. I bought it when it first came out in my second year of graduate school, which I believe was 1993.

It may have been before then. I know that we were fighting 6.0 resource limitations in 94

 

[Bulk Beef]

Soooo, how would you feel if you were a consultant and you still had to support WP 5.1 for the one or two people (every office has one, I know) in the office that just won't let go and move on?

 

[Agamar]

Most of the time I will convince people to move forward by showing them that their old documents can be imported easily into the newer word processors. Even if they only move to WO 2000, it is an improvment.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Originally posted by: sward666
Soooo, how would you feel if you were a consultant and you still had to support WP 5.1 for the one or two people (every office has one, I know) in the office that just won't let go and move on?

Yoyu need to show them a better mousetrap and also that the learning curve is not high. Demonstrate better productivity.
If you can not do this , then they should not switch.

 

[corkyg]

I bought WP 5.1 (DOS) in 1989!

 

[Rio Rebel]

I must not have been paying attention. 5.1 has been out longer. 6.0 for DOS, with the WYSIWYG interface, came out in about 93.

5.1 was out for quite a while, and many people didn't like moving away from it after they learned all those keystroke shortcuts.

 

[ScottMac]

I've been to a couple legal offices where WP & DOS are still being used.

Since they don't really need anything other than very basic text editing (some line numbers, some strikeouts, etc) they don't see a compleling reason to move to Windows / Word / GUI.

Most touch typists don't / didn't like the idea of having to remove their hands from the keyboard to mess with the mouse. WP (actually, WordStar was better) put most of the frequently used key combinations on the home row + CTRL or ALT.

I usually suggest updating on the basis of support: i.e., "You know if that printer dies, there'll (probably) be no support for the new printer" (which, of course, depends on which printer is currently in use).

If the platform and application works for what you are trying to do, aside from a support angle, why upgrade? People can only type so fast, and (as a business manager friend once said) " All computers wait at the same speed."

I still have an old CP/M 8080/Z80 box around and working. Televideo terminal, Diablo 630 Daisy printer. WordStar, SuperCalc, BASIC 5.0 ....rocks right along on 64K of static RAM and dual 126K Floppies. It's kinda fun tinkering with the old stuff.


FWIW

Scott

 

[aircooled]

And for the IT guys out there, what the oldest app you're expected to support?

Office 97 is the oldest "common app" that I have to support. But we also have some older "specialized" software that is DOS based that I deal with (hopefully not for long). I hope to be completely away from DOS and even NT4 by the years end. The problem is hardware, we need to upgrade all of our hardware before going win2k and higher company-wide.

 

[Rio Rebel]

I was supporting Windows 95 as late as last year.

But there's a reason for companies moving slowly. We got burned pretty badly on Windows 2000 - we just upgraded last year, and now we need to move to XP to get some new applications to function correctly. A major corporation can't afford to migrate to a new operating system two years in a row. When you have to test and validate hundreds of pieces of software in various divisions, you can't go changing the OS very frequently (not even to move to a "Service Pack", which is where we are getting burned right now.)

But we're seeing more and more problems right now getting things to work together correctly. When we have a problem with an outdated version of someone's software, many times we're told that they aren't making any further improvements to that configuration, so we'd have to move to Service Pack 2 or Windows XP for it to work. But if we do, we then have any number of current programs that might NOT work.

It took a long time, but I finally understand now why businesses sometimes stay a generation or two behind in technology. They have to - they can't afford to be using software on thousands of machines while bugs are being worked out. Yet if they get too far behind, they have the problem above - new software doesn't run on it.

 

[Bulk Beef]

I usually suggest updating on the basis of support: i.e., "You know if that printer dies, there'll (probably) be no support for the new printer"

I too would like to suggest updating on the basis of support: i.e. "If your 14-year-old app doesn't work, I'm not f**king fixing it, you non-progressive end-user", but I can't do that (not if I want to keep my job).

This office uses Office 97, and these two users know how to use it, but like someone above noted, they're hanging on to WP for the keyboard shortcuts that they have learned to love so much. As a consultant, my suggestions can only be so strong before they start sounding like the above. Kind of a drag. Guess I'll just trudge along until the next time it breaks.

Thanks.

 

[JRez]

Sometimes, the effort required to migrate an end-user from an older application to a newer one requires extensive effort. Even when the FAB list is presented, they still don't see the benefit. We're having a heck of a time migrating users from NT4/Netscape mail to Win2K/Outlook 2K due to the differences in appearance and functionality.... these same users realize how screwed up Netscape was after the conversion. Best bet would be to see if there's any kind of functionality that can be added via macros to allow the key combos that worked in WP 5.1 to do the same in Word... if so, they really wouldn't have a reason to not migrate... especially with respect to font and presentation capabilities.