At one time we had to make an invoice system work with a dot matrix printer – it was chosen because it was cheap, reliable, needed little maintenance and it did the job well. It took the pre-printed invoices and printed the needed values on the paper, a huge improvement over writing them by hand. It (the printer) had a font selection menu with some standard fonts, and a 5.25 inch disk drive to upload custom fonts. Imagine this old dinosaur printer (which was very fun to work with), and you start to put yourself in the text processing universe of 20–30 years ago.

Almost Perfect describes the rise and fall of WordPerfect, a writing which changed my perception on this piece of software and the software business. It was very captivating to read, and I devoured it all last Sunday. Since the events happened a long time ago (in my case some of them even before I was born), it made an even more interesting read to learn about a piece of history.

POST#0068 2009-APR-6

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