Happy Birthday GroupWise
I got an email today from a good friend, Rodney Bliss, to tell me that GroupWise (Dos version) turns 20 years old today! Wow!
Of course, back then it was known as WordPerfect Office 2.0, but it was the beginnings of what would later become the GroupWise we know and love. While I don’t remember the exact day I began using WordPerfect Office, it WAS version 2.0, in the Spring of 1989. And while I didn’t meet Rodney Bliss (or even Richard for that matter) for many years after my first email, I got to know Rodney’s wife Annie fairly early along the way, and had no idea that this product would become so much a part of my life. Not only is GroupWise what pays the bills and keeps me on my toes, but GroupWise is also what has brought me good friends and colleagues along the way. I think of how much of my day is spent just communicating with so many people who are involved in GroupWise, and I can’t help but believe that my life is richer because of these people, and thus indirectly because of this “little email program”.
In many ways, GroupWise is even responsible for me meeting my husband Joe Zanre! If I had not been a sysop on the WPUsers forum on Compuserve, Joe and I never would have met! I guess I owe an awful lot to the developers of this product 🙂
Danita
And of course, without you GroupWise would have missed out on having its very own goddess!
The computer industry does a notoriously bad job of honoring its past. We joke about our PC’s become obsolete 6 months after we buy them, and users and support people both have had the lessons burned into our brains, “Are you running on the latest release?”
That’s why it was fun to reminisce with people over GroupWise. I think had it not been as memorable a data (8/8/88) and had the community not been as close as it is, this anniversary would have simply passed as one more busy Friday in our hectic pressure packed schedules.
Looking forward, let’s hope that our no-longer teenager, gets a chance to live out a long adulthood.
Rodney Bliss