Re: Development

[Harmon F Seaver hseaver@xxxxxxxx]

>** Reply to note from Marvin Katz  06/07/95
 >11:18pm -0400
>
>>  >> For the edification of us non-techies, what is
Starwriter? Sounds like  >> an upgrade of IBM's unsuccessful WP
program of the 1980s, whose  >name  >> escapes me.
>
>It has nothing to do with IBM. It was written by a German
outfit for  >OS/2 (OS/2 is a major operating system in Germany;
my  >communications program is also German). It is supposed to
be good  >and to somewhat resemble Word (not sure how it can be
both of those  >things). IBM bought it, or bought the rights or
whatever.

  It's part of a suite of apps called, I think, StarOffice,
which includes what is reported to be a good drawing program,
spreadsheet, etc. The demo of
StarWriter is on ftp.cdrom.com, I believe, but it's in German.
The English version will be out this summer. There is a windoz
version as well.
Supposedly it looks almost like a clone of word, but works much
better, and, of course, is a native OS/2 app. How it stacks up
against XY is anyone's guess at this point. I'm anxious to try
it, in fact downloaded the demo, but the motherboard on my
desktop died right after, and I've been too busy with exams to
deal with that, let alone try out a new wp with German menus. 8-)
But, since the new motherboard I just ordered takes a PowerPC daughterboard
(or Pentium, or Nexgen cpus), and I'll be running Warp for the
PPC soon, a native OS/2 word processor is certainly high on my
want list. And having one that is integrated to a good drawing
program would be very, very nice.

-- Harmon Seaver hseaver@xxxxxxxx hseaver@xxxxxxxx
seaverh@xxxxxxxx harmon@xxxxxxxx

Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the
answer is NO.