As some of you might know, Corel Corporation started as a systems integrator in the Ottawa region, providing all-in-one desktop publishing solutions based around the PC platform. In doing so, Corel started developing and selling utilities for existing DTP applications, but those utilities were command line based and required a lot of work and skills to master. In 1987, a project codenamed Waldo started at Corel to develop, from the ground up, a vector illustration and layout product that would be WYSIWYG, have advanced fonts handling and would be in full color (yes, a true revolution at the time where Hercules displays where still the standard and Windows 1.0 was a brand new product). This innovative product, to be named CorelDRAW, was presented to the world in the fall of 1988 (I believe it was at COMDEX on the Xerox booth) and it immediately got the attention of the whole industry (users, press and competitors alike).

A few weeks ago, I had the great privilege to meet Mark Charlesworth who was the Product Manager for CorelDRAW 1.0 and we recorded a video discussing this major milestone for Corel Corporation and the graphics industry in general. Here it is... Enjoy