Comment by Maken
8 days ago
LibreOffice is like Office a collection of intercompatible apps. Microsoft Works was a single application offering Word/Excel/Outlook-like functionality.
8 days ago
LibreOffice is like Office a collection of intercompatible apps. Microsoft Works was a single application offering Word/Excel/Outlook-like functionality.
And, oddly, a terminal emulator.
1980s office suites very commonly included terminal emulators, because they were in high-demand back then
Most large enterprises, you’d have core business applications running on a mainframe or minicomputer or Unix host, and you’d need a terminal emulator to access them from your PC/microcomputer. A lot of places used mainframe/minicomputer-based email/calendar (e.g. IBM PROFS, DISOSS, SNADS, Office/36, OfficeVision; DEC ALL-IN-ONE; DataGeneral CEO; HPMAIL; etc) and centrally hosted word processing systems (e.g. IBM DisplayWriter) were commonly used for document/content management. And then added to that you had services like CompuServe and BBS systems
It is likely the Microsoft Works developers dogfooded its terminal emulator a lot, since at the time Microsoft ran its business on Xenix servers, until they eventually migrated to Windows NT in the first half of the 1990s
In fact, MS-DOS was initially developed on mainframe/micros and targeted the IBM PC via cross compilation and link cable, they weren't doing it directly.