Getting on for 25 years ago, I was a user of Wordperfect, at that time a serious if aging contender in the word processing business, now dominated by Microsoft Word. One of the features of the product was something called 'Reveal Code' which, as I recall, offered an alternative view of your document to the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) view one usually worked with. A view which showed you something of the marking up needed to turn your raw text into something people would want to read, with pretty fonts, pretty layouts and all that good stuff. A view in which you could manipulate the mark up by drag and drop. This sometimes enabled you to fix documents which had become mildly corrupt, perhaps because of some obscure (and not very important) bug in the Wordperfect software. In rather in the same way that the Blogger product in which I am typing now has a 'Compose' tab and an 'HTML' tab, with this last being occasionally useful in just the same sort of way as the 'Reveal Code' feature in Wordperfect. I think Microsoft tried something of the sort in Word, but gave up when they found that keeping up two views of the same (ever more) complex document was just too much for their engineers.
All this came back into mind yesterday afternoon, and I wondered whether the product still existed. Was it still owned by Corel and run out of their yellow mirror glass office block on Carling Avenue in Ottawa - outside of which I once posed for a photograph. Answer yes, and Google quickly turned up reference 2 for me. So far, so good.
Then this afternoon, I was consulting a television listings site about which episode of Poirot was to be shown on ITV3 tonight, when the listing site saw fit to show me the small advertisement for Wordperfect snapped above.
Which is fair enough. I had exhibited slightly more than passing interest in their product, so it made sense for Corel to remind me about it today. Maybe I was teetering on the edge of a purchase and just needed a nudge to tip me over the edge. Although, as it happens, it is most unlikely that I will ever use Wordperfect again, fine product though it may be; the cost of change is just too strong for an amateur such as myself - even if they gave me the software - instead of appearing to want several hundred Canadian dollars for it.
But what impressed me was the speed with which this happened. The fact that I had been to the Corel site yesterday was somehow known to the entirely unrelated TV listings site today. A marriage made by the men from Google? Or was it the men from Microsoft? Or some other, more shadowy broker of more or less personal information that I have never heard of? I associate, for some reason, to the brokers in towns big and small, who used to lurk in the shadows, buying up cheap debt from distressed businesses.
PS 1: all of which reminds me of my theory that there is room for a much simpler word processor than Word, which has become far too complicated for the non-professional user. Why don't Microsoft offer a Word Lite for the rest of us? It vaguely comes to mind that they did try such a thing once, but I have yet to make any inquiries about that.
PS 2: Saturday morning: this morning's offering is from gmail, in which I am offered the services of an electroplating company who can do both zinc and nickel. Completely foxed by this one. Among traffic that should count for these purposes, the best I can do is an email from December 2018 and a blogpost from May 2019, both of which mention nickel. Nothing relevant for zinc and nothing at all for electroplating.
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/google.html.
Reference 2: https://www.wordperfect.com/en/.
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