It had its own Linux distro, Corel LinuxOS, which had a very smooth modified KDE and was the first distro to offer graphical screen-resolution setting. The non-Windows version of WordPerfect that lived the longest, though, was the Linux edition. I must try this on my Mac mini G4 and iBook G4. Efforts are afoot to get it to run natively on some of the later PowerMac G4 machines on which Apple disabled booting the classic OS. To be legal, of course, you will need to own a copy of MacOS 9 – that, sadly, isn't free. However, hope springs eternal: there is a free emulator called SheepShaver that can emulate classic MacOS on Intel-based Macs, and the WPDOS site has a downloadable, ready-to-use instance of the emulator all set up with MacOS 9 and WordPerfect for Mac. Of course, this is not a great deal of use unless you have a Mac that can still run Classic – which today means a PowerPC Mac with Mac OS X 10.4 or earlier. When Mac OS X loomed on the horizon, WordPerfect Corporation discontinued the Mac version – but when they did so, they made the last ever release, 3.5e, freeware. In theory, this could run on Linux using iBCS2 compatibility. I recall installing a text-only native Unix version on SCO Xenix 386 for a customer. In its heyday, it also ran on classic MacOS, the Amiga, the Atari ST and more. It was originally developed for a Data General minicomputer, and only later ported to the PC. It may be worth asking.īut WordPerfect was not, originally, a DOS or a PC program. The closest thing to a free version is the plain-text-only WordPerfect Editor.Įdit: I do not know if Corel operates a policy like Microsoft, where owning a new version allows you run any older version. Even the cut-down LetterPerfect still cost money. It still works – I have it running under PC-DOS 7.1 on an old Core 2 Duo Thinkpad, and it's blindingly fast.
Sadly, the DOS version has never been made freeware. And, of course, if you run Windows, then the program is still very much alive and well and you can buy it from Corel Corp. Indeed the author of that piece maintains a fan site that will tell you how to download and run WordPerfect for DOS on various modern computers, if you have a legal copy of it. WordPerfect came to totally dominate the DOS wordprocessor market, crushing pretty much all competition before it, and even today, some people consider it to be the ultimate word-processor ever created. I'm here to tell you how to get them and how to install and run them. In fact, there are two free versions: one for Classic MacOS, made freeware when WordPerfect discontinued Mac support, and a native Linux version, for which Corel offered a free, fully-working, demo version.īut there is a catch – of course: they're both very old and hard to run on a modern computer.
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