As Times go by

Why this website (still) exists…

Even in the year 2023 there are still people who mourn Tempus-Word. Those who deal a little with word processors can - possibly - understand that. Because Tempus-Word was very far ahead of its time in the 1990s. Unfortunately, the people responsible at that time had created a visionary software, but reality caught up with it: With the demise of Atari, the market for Tempus Word died. It was technologically very closely linked to the computer and its operating system. True, it can still be run today (2023) with emulators on Windows and Mac computers. But due to the advancement in the field of operating systems and technologies, the program - used in this way - is a foreign body that has fallen out of time.

However, there are some very long-running text projects that still work with Tempus Word. The reason for this is that there is hardly any modern word processor that allows smooth work in thousand-page documents with footnotes over several pages (!!) without complaint and without noticeable delay - despite emulation (!). If you need that, you can overlook some of the optical and technical shortcomings.

Active product maintenance was discontinued almost two decades ago, but we still receive requests for updates of old versions to the "current" one (from 2004…). Or old texts should be exported, but the program for it is missing.

For whatever reason you may need this or whatever you (still) want to do with Tempus-Word: You can request a free license for version 5.4 from us. It may take a while for us to get back to you and we will need your full address details to create a license file.

For these cases, there is still this website, if those interested want to download the latest version of Tempus-Word or just indulge in a bit of history.

Tempus Word 5.4 will be "the last version""

In the early 1990s Tempus Word was developed for the Atari. In 2003 former employees and users found together, to exceed the life cycle of the product by using an emulator.

In spite of the fact, that some of the features of Tempus-Word are still outstanding with today´s point of view: it is a program developed for GEM an therefore it represents a foreign body on newer operating systems. I new development for those OS has to face the fact of enormous costs for that and the acknowledgement, that the world has rotated over the years and new products were born, for example Libre- or OpenOffice, and several other more or less specialized software solutions, where Tempus-Word would need to find its place between.

This ist the reason, because "current version 5.40" very likely will be the last version of Tempus-Word. We have to advice against buying it as a new customer on this behave. Updates are only of interest to former users who need to preserve existing documents in their original printing. The trial version offered here, allows to export existing documents as an RTF file. Special properties will be lost, but you will save the content for further processing.

Norbert Simon, November 2023