4 ms·
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
by onionisafruit 1y ago
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.
- MBCook 1y agoYep. 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.
- 90s_dev 1y agoThe only keyboard thing similar to that I ever used was the full keyboard cover that came with the Flintstones PC game.
- MBCook 1y agoThis is either it or very very close: http://xahlee.info/kbd/wordperfect_shortcuts_strip.html http://xahlee.info/kbd/wordperfect_shortcuts_strip.html And for context, this link has a picture of it on top of a keyboard (cropped): https://luciamonterorodriguez.com/atajos-de-teclado-y-raton-en-word/ https://luciamonterorodriguez.com/atajos-de-teclado-y-raton-...
- sillywalk 1y agoI remember Janes AH-64 Longbow also had a keyboard cover. https://archive.org/details/janes-ah-64-d-longbow-95/keyboard1.jpeg https://archive.org/details/janes-ah-64-d-longbow-95/keyboar...
- bitwize 1y agoLotus 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.
- MBCook 1y agoRight. It wasn’t the only or the biggest. 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. As productivity software went though it was BIG.
- bitwize 1y agoWordPerfect 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.
- MBCook 1y agoI 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.
- SoftTalker 1y agoAs 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.
- Shorel 1y agoHave you ever used LaTeX? 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.
- pbhjpbhj 1y agoThe loss of `reveal codes` is still felt when Word does arbitrary craziness with documents!
- SoftTalker 1y agoDoes (did) Word even have "codes" as such? I thought it was quite different from WP in that regard. Modern Word .docx is an XML format now anyway.
- themadturk 1y agoPart 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.
- jimbob45 1y agoA bit like how Office was THE program in the late 90s and in the 2000s before Google Docs really started taking off. This is wishful thinking. Google Docs is only hovering around 10% market share.
- MBCook 1y agoThat seems low to me, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’s not dominant. However it has an awful lot of mindshare.
- frosted-flakes 1y agoGoogle 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.
- MBCook 1y agoI would say Works, it’s much more than Wordpad. 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.
- nubinetwork 1y agoWordPerfect 7 during the win95 era was alright... but businesses went office, and compatibility was a crapshoot, so home users followed suit.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 1y agoI 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.
- Shorel 1y agoWord 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.
- Calwestjobs 1y agoWordPad ! shipped with windows for 20 years after that. for free. .RTF! :)
- asveikau 1y agoI 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?
- saltcured 1y agoI 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?"
- buescher 1y agoYou can lock down almost all the manual formatting in Word (i.e. allow styles only), and you can make a template out of it too.
- themadturk 1y agoI remember a version of WordPerfect on an AT&T Unix workstation someone was selling in the early/mid-90s. I wanted one so bad.