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That's funny you mention the lawyer thing. My dad is a lawyer and his firm still uses it today. I've shown him Google Docs, and even Word, but he still swears b

That's funny you mention the lawyer thing. My dad is a lawyer and his firm still uses it today. I've shown him Google Docs, and even Word, but he still swears by his WordPerfect (and now that I think about he still uses AOL). I didn't read through the manuscript but I'm curious ifWP targeted lawyers back in the day.

aeturnum 12y ago
My dad is also a lawyer and is extremely sad about the demise of WP. I wonder if there's something about the feature set that makes it good for lawyers.
- Curmudgel 12y ago
  For what it's worth, I also know several lawyers that were unhappy when they were eventually forced to switch from WP to Microsoft Word.
- EpicEng 12y ago
  Wow, same with my Mom, who is a lawyer.
- benjohnson 12y ago
  This could be incorrect: I've been told by layers that WP got the word count feature right at a time when MS Word often didn't. Apparently, certain aspects of the profession demand that some documents don't go above a limit. As I understood it - if they do, then the document can be thrown out by the opposing side.
- chiph 12y ago
  Part of it was their existing base of WP template documents. They could charge hundreds of dollars for a filing or demand document that was nothing more than a mail-merge.
- kazinator 12y ago
  I worked as an IT person for a fairly big law firm in the summer of 1989, and as a part time contractor during the rest of the year and early 1990. It was an all WordPerfect shop, with a Novell Netware LAN. :) I'm not sure about the feature set, but WordPerfect was once very wildly popular in the corporate world in general, not only in law firms! In the late 1980's, word processing on a DOS PC pretty much meant WordPerfect; it was the leading product. And, of course, lawyers produce reams of documents, which usually have to stick around for a long time. So they don't like converting documents from one form to another; of course they will gripe about the demise of software. A document produced by a lawyer in 1990 might still need to be accessible today. A memo produced by some random manager in some random corporation produced in 1990 is probably long forgotten. Some old-time ex-users of WordPerfect will tend to bring up the "Reveal Codes" function. Wordperfect documents had a kind of markup language consisting of codes; and you could drop into that level to see how some markup (like bold, italics or whatever) is really represented, and fix it. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes Oh, and there are some clues in the same page about the connection between the legal world and WordPerfect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers "A related factor is that WordPerfect Corporation was particularly responsive to feature requests from the legal profession, incorporating many features particularly useful to that niche market and those features have been continued in subsequent versions usually directly accessible with key combinations."
  - to3m 12y ago
    Reveal Codes was my favourite WordPerfect feature. (I'm not a lawyer though.) It wasn't so much that it revealed how things are represented, because the coding was simplistic enough that there wasn't any real underlying representation as such separate from the document formatting - it simply told you where regions of one style began an ended. Like looking at an HTML document in View Source mode. You could have half the display dedicated to Reveal Codes, as I recall, and edit in either mode as you went along (a bit like Dreamweaver). Made it super-easy to keep things in line. Word, by contrast, makes it very unclear where one format begins and the next ends, meaning it's all too easy to make a mess. (Back when I still used Word, though maybe they've fixed it by now, it was very common for the space after the last character in a page before a manual page break to have the format of the following page, for example! Caused havoc when trying to style the last sentence...)
ghaff 12y ago
The reveal codes feature in WordPerfect probably had something to do with its initial popularity because it helped you to be sure that there wasn't text hidden in the document. That said, I expect that, at a time when there were a lot of different word processors out there, WordPerfect gained a foothold at law firms for at least somewhat accidental reasons. At which point document compatibility made it somewhat of a standard in the profession. (It also ran on quite a few different systems as I recall, so many firms may well have run it on the minicomputers that they were also using for other purposes.) I never much cared for it myself but a former employers sold quite a bit of it (on minicomputers) to law forms.
- mrbill 12y ago
  When I started learning HTML, I thought "Ah, it's just like reveal-codes in Wordperfect!" and that made it much easier to understand.
  - notahacker 12y ago
    Reveal codes is why I'm convinced that my mother, who finds using a mouse difficult, never mind mysteriously-worded dialogue boxes and context-shifting menu ribbons, would have been quite happy authoring web pages in the era before font tags became unfashionable. Its funny, I can think of very few obvious advances in word processors since the mid-90s, but loss of Reveal Codes is a definite backward step from WordPerfect for DOS, which is probably the first piece of software I ever used.
    - hackuser 12y ago
      > loss of Reveal Codes is a definite backward step from WordPerfect for DOS All versions of WordPerfect for Windows had and have Reveal codes. Word on the other hand ...
- hackuser 12y ago
  > The reveal codes feature in WordPerfect probably had something to do with its initial popularity because it helped you to be sure that there wasn't text hidden in the document. Reveal codes is essentially your browser's view source command, but with interactive editing (i.e., with live update of the WYSIWYG output). I never heard of it being used to check for hidden text, though I suppose that's possible. It is used to address formatting issues -- those annoying situations where the word processor is doing something unexpected, or if you want to know if the empty space is a set of spaces or a tab.
shutupalready 12y ago
> My dad is a lawyer and his firm still uses it today. I've shown him Google Docs I'm wondering if a lawyer's use of Google Docs or other web-based document storage app would be considered a breach of client privacy or violation of some confidentiality laws? Yes, I know that lawyers (and doctors, etc.) use email, but email is at least 30 years older than could-based apps like Google Docs, so more allowance has been made for it. In other words, a lawyer might fear getting into trouble for using web-based storage, but won't fear sending the same thing by email. Yes, I also know that proper use of cryptography can solve all of these issues, but we all know that virtually no lawyer (or doctor or similar professional) ever uses encryption.

aeturnum 12y ago

My dad is also a lawyer and is extremely sad about the demise of WP. I wonder if there's something about the feature set that makes it good for lawyers.

Curmudgel 12y ago
For what it's worth, I also know several lawyers that were unhappy when they were eventually forced to switch from WP to Microsoft Word.
EpicEng 12y ago
Wow, same with my Mom, who is a lawyer.
benjohnson 12y ago
This could be incorrect: I've been told by layers that WP got the word count feature right at a time when MS Word often didn't. Apparently, certain aspects of the profession demand that some documents don't go above a limit. As I understood it - if they do, then the document can be thrown out by the opposing side.
chiph 12y ago
Part of it was their existing base of WP template documents. They could charge hundreds of dollars for a filing or demand document that was nothing more than a mail-merge.
kazinator 12y ago
I worked as an IT person for a fairly big law firm in the summer of 1989, and as a part time contractor during the rest of the year and early 1990. It was an all WordPerfect shop, with a Novell Netware LAN. :) I'm not sure about the feature set, but WordPerfect was once very wildly popular in the corporate world in general, not only in law firms! In the late 1980's, word processing on a DOS PC pretty much meant WordPerfect; it was the leading product. And, of course, lawyers produce reams of documents, which usually have to stick around for a long time. So they don't like converting documents from one form to another; of course they will gripe about the demise of software. A document produced by a lawyer in 1990 might still need to be accessible today. A memo produced by some random manager in some random corporation produced in 1990 is probably long forgotten. Some old-time ex-users of WordPerfect will tend to bring up the "Reveal Codes" function. Wordperfect documents had a kind of markup language consisting of codes; and you could drop into that level to see how some markup (like bold, italics or whatever) is really represented, and fix it. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes Oh, and there are some clues in the same page about the connection between the legal world and WordPerfect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers "A related factor is that WordPerfect Corporation was particularly responsive to feature requests from the legal profession, incorporating many features particularly useful to that niche market and those features have been continued in subsequent versions usually directly accessible with key combinations."
- to3m 12y ago
  Reveal Codes was my favourite WordPerfect feature. (I'm not a lawyer though.) It wasn't so much that it revealed how things are represented, because the coding was simplistic enough that there wasn't any real underlying representation as such separate from the document formatting - it simply told you where regions of one style began an ended. Like looking at an HTML document in View Source mode. You could have half the display dedicated to Reveal Codes, as I recall, and edit in either mode as you went along (a bit like Dreamweaver). Made it super-easy to keep things in line. Word, by contrast, makes it very unclear where one format begins and the next ends, meaning it's all too easy to make a mess. (Back when I still used Word, though maybe they've fixed it by now, it was very common for the space after the last character in a page before a manual page break to have the format of the following page, for example! Caused havoc when trying to style the last sentence...)

ghaff 12y ago

The reveal codes feature in WordPerfect probably had something to do with its initial popularity because it helped you to be sure that there wasn't text hidden in the document. That said, I expect that, at a time when there were a lot of different word processors out there, WordPerfect gained a foothold at law firms for at least somewhat accidental reasons. At which point document compatibility made it somewhat of a standard in the profession. (It also ran on quite a few different systems as I recall, so many firms may well have run it on the minicomputers that they were also using for other purposes.) I never much cared for it myself but a former employers sold quite a bit of it (on minicomputers) to law forms.

mrbill 12y ago
When I started learning HTML, I thought "Ah, it's just like reveal-codes in Wordperfect!" and that made it much easier to understand.
- notahacker 12y ago
  Reveal codes is why I'm convinced that my mother, who finds using a mouse difficult, never mind mysteriously-worded dialogue boxes and context-shifting menu ribbons, would have been quite happy authoring web pages in the era before font tags became unfashionable. Its funny, I can think of very few obvious advances in word processors since the mid-90s, but loss of Reveal Codes is a definite backward step from WordPerfect for DOS, which is probably the first piece of software I ever used.
  - hackuser 12y ago
    > loss of Reveal Codes is a definite backward step from WordPerfect for DOS All versions of WordPerfect for Windows had and have Reveal codes. Word on the other hand ...
hackuser 12y ago
> The reveal codes feature in WordPerfect probably had something to do with its initial popularity because it helped you to be sure that there wasn't text hidden in the document. Reveal codes is essentially your browser's view source command, but with interactive editing (i.e., with live update of the WYSIWYG output). I never heard of it being used to check for hidden text, though I suppose that's possible. It is used to address formatting issues -- those annoying situations where the word processor is doing something unexpected, or if you want to know if the empty space is a set of spaces or a tab.

shutupalready 12y ago

> My dad is a lawyer and his firm still uses it today. I've shown him Google Docs I'm wondering if a lawyer's use of Google Docs or other web-based document storage app would be considered a breach of client privacy or violation of some confidentiality laws? Yes, I know that lawyers (and doctors, etc.) use email, but email is at least 30 years older than could-based apps like Google Docs, so more allowance has been made for it. In other words, a lawyer might fear getting into trouble for using web-based storage, but won't fear sending the same thing by email. Yes, I also know that proper use of cryptography can solve all of these issues, but we all know that virtually no lawyer (or doctor or similar professional) ever uses encryption.