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My company used Data General mini computers, which is where Word Perfect began. We paid them $60,000 a year for the license for our many terminals and another $80,000 a year for maintenance. They had to run a license renewal program on our computer or the program would stop working at midnight December 31.
Then one year after they'd been so successful on the PC for a few years they told us in November they were no longer supporting the DG. Our license would expire at the end of the year, and it did.
We had one month to buy PC's to replace our terminals, during which time I had to write a terminal emulator that would do the things we needed. We had to buy PC versions of Word Perfect for every PC. I forget how much all that cost but we had several hundred terminals.
We sued Word Perfect and won the suit but we didn't come close to getting what we lost out of them. I forget the details. I wasn't involved in that part of it.
I've had a bitter taste when i think of Word Perfect ever since then. We were their first large customer and we were their biggest customer for years and then they didn't need us anymore.
Barry
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