|
Ventura Publisher was originally developed by 3-man startup
called Ventura Software Inc. with an initial release in 1986. The product was
initially distributed by several OEM distributors (Prometheus, Univation and a
couple of others).
As with Adobe, this corporation was started by a group of Xerox
employees who couldn't convince Xerox to make a commercial venture of their
software. However, in the case of VSI, they maintained their ties with Xerox,
and Xerox soon obtained exclusive marketing rights and assumed responsibility
for tech support.
Xerox and its European partner Rank Xerox marketed the product
without developmental control until 1989. when Xerox purchased the source code.
The 3.0 versions were released by Xerox Desktop Software, Inc. but Xerox soon
bought the Ventura name and XDS was spun off as Ventura Software Incorporated,
A Xerox Company, or VSI for short.
VSI developed the product along with Ventura Database Publisher,
Ventura Scan, Ventura ColorPro, Ventura AdPro, and Ventura Separator.
Corel got its start as a Ventura solutions provider. They went
on to develop Draw and in Fall 1993 purchased Ventura and all related
technology from VSI. With the sale of its primary product, VSI ceased
operations in December 1993.
The initial release under the Corel name was Corel Ventura
Publisher 4.2. Except for a few minor changes, this was just a bundling of VP
4.11, DBP and a bunch of Corel fonts and clipart in order to get the product on
the shelves with the Corel name.
All versions of Ventura through 4.x were primarily coded in
Assembler language. The Windows versions were Assembly code that had been
wrapped in a shell to run within Windows. When Corel bought Ventura, VSI was in
the process of converting the code to C++. Corel took on the task of completing
this process, but some of the conversion did not go smoothly. The result was V5
which was released in November 1994.
Ventura 5 is the last version with ties to the original product
other than the name. Corel decided to completely reengineer the product as a
32-bit Windows application for V6 (which was eventually released as V7). The
process took considerably longer than Corel hoped, lasting about 2 years. As a
result, it was released as V7 so that the version number coincided with the
current version of Draw at that time.
V8 is the second generation of this code. |