A look back: Galaxy word processor

As an undergraduate student in the early 1990s, I wrote all my class papers using WordPerfect for DOS. WordPerfect was a powerful desktop word processor that was used in offices all over the world. But WordPerfect was quite expensive; my student edition of WordPerfect cost around $300.

When the new version of WordPerfect came out, I just couldn't afford to buy it. Fortunately, the shareware market was starting to take off around this time. Shareware" was a new model where software publishers released a program for free so you could try it out - usually for a limited time. If you liked it, you sent them a check and they mailed back a registered copy of the software. Shareware often had the same or similar features as the commercial software it aimed to displace, usually at a lower price.

And that's how I discovered the Galaxy word processor. Galaxy had all the features that I needed in a desktop word processor, but at about one-third the price. The registration fee for Galaxy was $99.

There's so many pieces of software that lost out in the market, and the further back in time we go, the more obscure these tend to get. I had never heard of Galaxy, but I'm glad someone took the time to write this article, ensuring - hopefully - it'll be saved from obscurity for a long time to come.