Unrelated to WordPerfect, but similar to your story: in my military service I served on signalling station (armored vehicle loaded with radios and antennas) and

Unrelated to WordPerfect, but similar to your story: in my military service I served on signalling station (armored vehicle loaded with radios and antennas) and our job was to monitor the radios using a serial connection from a laptop, staring at a terminal output. Just look at the spew from the serial port, look at a few key numbers and take action (adjust antennas, bring up backup) if the numbers fall below a threshold. These laptops were radiation hardened 486's running MS-DOS. And they had QBasic installed. And QBasic can interface with serial ports and play a loud beep on the laptop's PC speaker. Well you can guess the rest. Unfortunately, just as I've had completed the program well enough so I could take a nap while on duty, I was transferred to another kind of command post vehicle that had Windows boxes with no qbasic and CO's seated in the same vehicle.