[Info-vax] OT: Rob Short: Operating System Evolution

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 03-01-2010 05:13, Michael Kraemer wrote:
>> Arne Vajhøj schrieb:
>>> And MS supply free readers for doc/xls/ppt as well.
>>>
>>> And they have publicized their formats as well, so
>>> other can implement them.
>>>
>>> So the difference is ??
>>
>> that M$ didn't do this until their monopoly
>> was completed. About fifteen years ago
>> you'd had a hard time to view those proprietary
>> formats properly on anything different than M$ Windoze+office.
> 
> True. But you would have the same problems with Lotus, WordPerfect
> etc. products.
> 
> Arne
> 

ISTR that there was/is WordPerfect for VMS.  I'm quite certain that it 
was available about ten years ago.  I'm not sure about now.

I wouldn't expect ANY word processor to be a huge success on VMS.  It's 
damned difficult to run a WYSIWYG processor on a system that natively 
can output only ASCII text.  You can run it on a workstation but I think 
it's a great deal cheaper to run it on a PC.

OTOH I've used TeX on VMS with output to a laser printer.