Some hardy souls are selling this on Amazon.
Posted on 11/21/2011 8:32:43 PM PST by smokingfrog
Microsoft's Bill Gates took the witness stand Monday in a $1 billion antitrust lawsuit accusing the software maker of duping a competitor prior to its rollout of Windows 95.
Gates began his testimony with a history of Microsoft Corp. and was expected to remain on the stand throughout the day. He said he was just 19 when he helped found the software giant.
“We thought everybody would have a personal computer on every desk and in every home,” he said. “We wanted to be there and be the first.”
Gates, wearing a gray suit and a yellow tie, was the first witness to testify Monday as Microsoft lawyers presented their case in the trial that's been ongoing in federal court in Salt Lake City for about a month.
Utah-based Novell Inc. sued Microsoft in 2004, claiming the Redmond, Washington, company violated U.S. antitrust laws through its arrangements with other computer makers when it launched Windows 95. Novell says it was later forced to sell WordPerfect for a $1.2 billion loss.
The company argues that Gates, Microsoft's co-founder, ordered company engineers to reject WordPerfect as a Windows 95 application because he feared it was too good. WordPerfect's share of the market then plummeted from nearly 50 percent to less than 10 percent as Microsoft's own office programs took hold.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Isn’t NOvell now nothing but a front for a lawsuit happy kabal of shysters?
No, that was SCO.
Word Perfect was great, but the thing was harder to use and even harder to train someone to use.
I took naturally to Word Perfect because I was trained in the era of IBM Selectric Keyboarding but for the users who never typed, MS Word was incredible. Even they could type.
In the end, Word won due to its simplicity and not because it was more capable.
Word sucked from the beginning and still sucks. I am stuck with it but I hate it (and Office 2010) with a personal passion.
WordPerfect WAS better. MUCH MUCH better.
I don’t know what that says about the merits of the case, but it is true.
Some hardy souls are selling this on Amazon.
Ive known about SCO, but I thought that’s what Novell ended up becoming as well.
Hey, they weren't that bad.
You are correct. Wordperfect was awesome. Word tried to emulate a typewriter, along with all of the limitations of dealing with one character at a time. Wordperfect threw away the typewriter model and managed the entire document with codes. I still have my WP12 disks, but I can only work in Word because of compatibility.
Is this the same suit? So it took almost ten years after the fact to bring the suit, and another seven to get it to trial? And who says the American legal system is @*$#ed up.
No, they’re mostly software/services now. Not a lawsuit factory.
It made MS Word look positively third rate.
With WordPerfect, I could do absolutely everything, not so with Word.
Even now, I look to WP even though the newer versions aren't up to earlier WP versions to do the same work that it takes Word, and two or three MS programs need.
I'd love to testify in this case. Microsoft works to punish superior competitors, like Novell and force Windows' customers into using MS' inferior products!
OpenOffice still has almost full WordPerfect compatibility, which Word still doesn’t.
Talk about an old lawsuit. Windows 95 was no great shakes either... Windows 98 was a lot better.
I still use Word Perfect version 10 (2002) on my Windows 7 machine.
< /sarc >
WordPerfect 8 can be convinced to run fairly well on Vista. I have given up trying to get it to run on Windows 7.
I used them too, even used gold star, didn’t like any of them because they weren’t working with many of the printers.
HP and Word Perfect really took off with the introduction of early laser printers, killed all others because WP supported pcl natively.
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