Word Perfect!!! I'm almost positive that was the editor they taught me in the early 1990s in grammar school! (We called it grammar school back then, for it was the 1800s.) And yet I had never seen or used it since. This brings back so many memories. I was sitting next to a girl named Dana, the only Dana I ever met.
It was huge back then, but it tanked in the transition to Windows. I kept using the DOS version for years after that because I had muscle memory for WordPerfect’s shortcuts and liked the reveal codes feature.
Also I’ve met two Danas that I can remember. Both were lovely people.
Yep. It was THE program. A bit like how Office was THE program in the late 90s and in the 2000s before Google Docs really started taking off.
The kind of thing people bought computers for. You didn’t need a computer. You needed Word Perfect.
I still remember the little card you could put above the function keys on your keyboard that showed you what alt-F7 or ctrl-F9 did. Each modifier was a different color.
First program I remember seeing people really use on a computer when I was a kid.
As I understand it, WordPerfect held on in the legal professions after most others had switched to MS Office (Word). I guess there were a lot of good templates and many law firms had all their boilerplate documents in WP and didn't want to change.
Word Perfect was like LaTeX and MS Word at the same time. You could edit text or you could edit the codes and there were no nasty surprises or any random reorganization of the document because you copy pasted something.
Also, by editing the codes you could dictate the precise way the document should look.
I think it was ahead of its time.
Sadly, WP 6.0 changed the macro language too much (they made everything an object and many features were lost) and it was not as successful as WP5.1, because you just don't make all the macros of your customers obsolete overnight.
Part of the appeal of WordPerfect (and Reveal Codes) in the legal industry was the ability to create a document that look exactly what you needed it to look like. Appellate briefs, as I remember, had to be no more than a certain number of pages of text of a certain font and point size with specified margins and line spacing, and doing that in Word was doable but a nightmare.
Lotus 1-2-3 was THE program for PCs in the DOS era. WordPerfect was a close second, followed by dBase and then maybe Flight Simulator.
When magazines reported, or OEMs advertised, that a particular computer had "100% IBM compatibility", generally there wasn't like a formal benchmark for this. It basically meant that the PC versions of Lotus and Flight Simulator ran fine on the machine.
I was trying to get across it was one of the juggernauts of the day. A program normal people knew about if you knew the names of any computer programs.
Perhaps it was the most popular for home users, I don’t know. I was far too young in its heyday.
WordPerfect was the go-to in the legal profession. Among other advantages, its "Reveal Codes" feature was an enormous help in making sure documents were formatted correctly, which was essential in law, as courts often have specific formatting requirements for filed documents.
Microsoft Word not only lacked Reveal Codes, it mocked it in an Easter egg in Word for Windows 2.0. Tells you what you need to know about Word, basically.
I remember when I first heard the legal profession still used WP like 2 decades after its heyday. It was a real surprise.
But if you’re going to have a niche market, that’s a pretty good niche. They care about formatting a lot and have a lot of money to spend if it helps them enough.
Google Docs has a feature set more in line with Wordpad (the stripped down word processor that comes with Windows) than Office Word. I can't understand how anyone can use it for anything at all without running into its limitations, so I'm not surprised it's not all that popular outside of basic shared documents.
The vast majority of documents people write for within Google Docs’ limitations. I wouldn’t use it for a book or maybe a dissertation. But it works great for a lot of day to day internal business documents.
I recall hearing that WordPerfect usage survived longer in the legal field.
I also remember in the late 90s, before StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice took off, WordPerfect had a resurgence on Linux, because there was a need for a word processor. I seem to recall a distro shipping with it prominently. Was it Corel Linux?
I remember when WordPerfect vs Wordstar was the religious debate in the PC world like vi vs emacs. As Macs brought WYSIWYG and desktop publishing to consumers and small business, things got messy.
Does anybody remember AMI Pro? I think that was where I first started to learn about "paragraph styles" and the disciplined way someone could use these WYSIWYG editors a bit like one can use LaTeX styles. Assign styles abstractly, then be able to change in one place and modify all occurrences throughout a document.
However, this just set me up for decades of frustration as the vast majority of business users cannot be bothered to use any discipline at all. Documents would be littered with overlapping bits of manual formatting that would drive me insane with their impossible interactions. And if they defined paragraph styles, it was as endless litter of new styles so that they were hardly ever reused.
It may be my Wordstar indoctrination coming through, but I think these tools would all be better with explicit markup for boundaries, so you could escape the madness of never being able to predict, "which implied style(s) are going to apply to the next character I type with the current cursor position?"
I recall using the Windows version of WordPerfect 6. The performance was awful versus Word on the same hardware.
It was also very unstable. I remember going to a friend's house to use his better computer and WordPerfect 6 to dress up a paper for school. It took hours longer than it should have due to the constant crashes. It was a very solid lesson in "save often" for teenage me.
I adored WordPerfect under DOS. The experience of WP6 for Windows was so bad that I switched to Word and never tried any future WP versions. Maybe they made it better in 7, but the damage was done.
Word Perfect 6.0 (they also had a DOS version) should be taught in software engineering universities as one of the prime examples of product managers killing the company.
5.1 was perfection, but the interface was text console. 6.0 was a complete redesign of … everything, and it was more a bad clone of MS Word than an improvement over WP 5.1.
Man, I had to use Word Perfect in school in 1997. It seemed dumb at the time, but I learned some valuable lessons about markup and the importance of seeing hidden control characters to troubleshoot formatting issues.
I'm around that age. In poorer areas we just had whatever cast-off computers. Circa 1995, my grammar school featured:
- A Franklin ACE (Apple ][ Clone) with an amber screen and two floppy drives
- An Atari ST with a daisywheel printer (Letter quality!)
The newest additions to the school were:
- A Compaq 386 with an amber screen - this is where we had WordPerfect
- A Tandy 1000, 8086 with DOS and a color monitor. Not sure if it could do VGA, definitely CGA was a thing. We ran Where in The World Is Carmen Sandiego and a paint program on that. Because it was in my classroom, this was really the first computer I learned exhaustively. I read its MS-DOS manual cover to cover and enjoyed writing batch files, building launcher menus, etc.
