#New Amiga from SGI!
5 messages in this thread
Tee hee. While I agree with you, at least generally, I should point out that
WordPerfect is still written in assembly language. Alway has been. <g>
Bob
And it really sucks for it. It made it difficult to port, difficult to
maintain and update and difficult to fix bugs in. It's the entire reason
that the Amiga version was completely seperate from the MS-DOS version
such that we could never get 4.2 or 5.0, etc.
And it isn't true anymore. WordPerfect for Unix was done entirely in C.
That version they could quickly port. They quickly test ported it to the
Amiga about the time they decided to drop Amiga support. They couldn't
update versions by porting DOS asembly code again, they realized that was
silly and cost a hell of a lot of money in programmer-years. The quick
Unix port to the Amiga would have required more than 1 meg (4, I think)
and they didn't think there was enough market for that. Of course,
WordPerfect for Windows probably needs more than 4 megs to run reasonably,
and I wouldn't bet that it is still entirely in assembly either.
Dale Larson
– An Amiga Software Engineer with some time on his hands.
All true. I didn't know they had switched.
At the time they first wrote WP, however, using assembly made sense – the
machines just had no speed, and WP was incredibly feature-rich and intuitively
interfaced, both of which suck CPU cycles…assembly was the fastest way to do
it.
Bob
Dale,
One thing you left out–Commodore was asked to pay WordPerfect about 3
million dollars to release the thing.
It was when Commodore said 'no', did they decide to deep-six the Amiga
version.
Source: Jim Dionne, Commodore
-mark=
Otto Pilot Engaged..
If WP looked at the situation and said to itself "We need 3 million to
recoup costs on taking this to release, and we don't think we can sell any
of them" then it seems perfectly reasonable to say to Commodore "We'll
make sure the Amiga is supported if you pay the costs." They had been
planning to deep-six the Amiga for some time (hadn't they already
announced that they were doing it and then taken it back?).
Dale Larson
– An Amiga Software Engineer with some time on his hands.