That was a difficult concept to sell because all the various programmers and companies wanted you to use only their product but market forces won out and were quite ruthless in doing so.

Marion insists that the Wang word processing program was/is far superior than any on the market today and Joe swears that Paper Clip was the equal to most of the Microsoft Word program. These two, and many other programs, are history now due to various marketing strategies that failed.

Even the mighty WordPerfect Corporation couldn’t really compete with the push by Microsoft and went through several owners and the name now belongs to Corel.

Apple had their own system of producing documents and they became the snob, elite system and they tended to be quite proprietary with their system.

So, as I said, a genius came up with an idea of having a standard that could be used and Adobe Acrobat is just that. They have a very nice system available for a couple of hundred dollars that will allow you to convert any document into the .pdf format so that everyone that gets access to it can read it. The Adobe Website store is down as we write this so an exact price can’t be provided.

All of the above lead to one superb piece of freeware called Adobe Acrobat Reader. The program is the key to the entire sharing of documents since it is free, easily downloaded and works with all operating systems.

Go to any search engine and ask for adobe acrobat reader and you will go to a site for a free download.

Why free?  Well, if you want to sell the program for several hundred dollars, giving the reader to the vast public means that you have a built-in customer base. Millions of people need the reader to be able to open the various documents published by the government, by businesses, and by the heavy computer user. Many software manuals are in .pdf format which means that paper isn’t used in furnishing a manual to every purchaser which translates into less expense to the company and a lower software price to you.

When you click onto the icon for the reader all you have to do is simply select a .pdf file and it will be displayed. You can then read it or print it as you wish.

The nice thing is that you can go to most government sites and download their forms and instructions regardless of which format the document was originally in. Once they post it in the .pdf format you can get it and use it as required.

Great idea and great program; www.adobe.com is the place to go.