Degrees's Journal: Happy birthday GroupWise

Today (minus twenty years) WordPerfect Office 2.0 for DOS LANs shipped. WordPerfect Office got renamed to GroupWise in 1994; here we are today.

Although we got chided a little bit by some Novell staffers. Today marks the 20 year birthday of the GroupWise that runs on DOS - but the original product was released for the Data General mini in 1986. And it ran on a VAX/VMS before it did DOS. Isn't celebrating the DOS version is a rather Microsoft-ish thing to do? <hangs head>

Anyway, back in 1998, someone wrote A History of GroupWise. It's terribly sales-pitchy, but might be a fun read. Did you know that GroupWise was used as the messaging system at the 1994 NetWorld+Interop show in Las Vegas, Nev., where approximately 88,000 users sent/received 2.2 million messages? Or that WordPerfect Office 3.0 was the first LAN-based, multi-server product to offer E-mail, calendaring and scheduling across multiple platforms?

The product manager for GroupWise, Dean Lythgoe, posts in his blog that he still has three people on staff from back in those days.

Anyway, I really like GroupWise. I thought it was so cool, back in 1996, when GroupWise would send a message to my text pager fifteen minutes before every meeting (I had set up the GroupWise Pager gateway that used a modem to dial AT&T). Once or twice, I'd been sent out in the field, and this feature saved my butt as I high-tailed it back to the office, just in time!

Anyway, Happy Birthday (to the DOS version) of GroupWise. :D

Those weird-ass key combinations?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Not IBM CUA-compliant. Reason? These were the same keys used for the equivalent functions in Data General's native text editor.

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

I use emacs without the CUA bindings.

It's like a new pair of underwear. At first it's constrictive, but after a while it becomes a part of you.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105793/quotes [imdb.com]

Re:

[Degrees]

Every once in a while, the subject of key bindings comes up. I really like the mnemonic Ctrl-B for bold, Ctrl-I for italics, Ctrl-Backspace to delete the whole word to the left, Ctrl-R for read later, Ctrl-M for mark read. But it is one of those things than an Outlook user who is new to our environment finds distasteful. I havn't seen Wayne's World, but that's a pretty good quote. ;-)

Re:

[Degrees]

I did not know that. Thank you. And like smitty says below, after a while, you get to like them. ;-)