WordPerfect is still being sold. Lawyers used to love it, but I think they’ve mostly moved on to Word now. So who’s still buying new licenses for WP in 2024?
Related:
I still use WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS
Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
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Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#22Late 80's: WP's 'Reveal Codes' helped me whip up some code that imported our application's screen definitions so I could use them directly in a specification document, impressing our customer. WP was an elegant weapon in a more civilized age.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#23Back in the late 80's I was feeling the kind of the world editing documents WYSIWYG with some Desktop Publishing package on my Atari ST, while my friends toiled away in the stone age of PC text mode with WordPerfect and that incredibly weird and primitive thing (to me): reveal codes.
By the time I moved to PCs I could use Windows 3.x and MS Word, so I lived through college in the late 80s and early 90s without ever using WP. But I still learned to understand the meaning, reason and power of reveal codes.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#24Back in the late 80's I was feeling the kind of the world editing documents WYSIWYG with some Desktop Publishing package on my Atari ST, while my friends toiled away in the stone age of PC text mode with WordPerfect and that incredibly weird and primitive thing (to me): reveal codes. By the time I moved to PCs I could use Windows 3.x and MS Word, so I lived through college in the late 80s and early 90s without ever u…
Funny you should mention the Atari ST. I heard WordPerfect did make it to the platform, but only for a short time. I wonder if it was any good?
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#25This makes me sadder than I thought it would.
My first computer [1] didn't have Microsoft Word on it, but it had WordPerfect installed with the OEM Windows. I've always had really horrid handwriting so I preferred to type out all my homework since I was twelve or so, so I had to use whatever I could to do so, and WordPerfect was there.
I grew to actually really like it, and I used it for about two years until my hard drive crashed, I had to reinstall Windows, and then I installed StarOffice (which Google was giving away for free from Google Pack or something like that).
Still, I liked WordPerfect, and looking at the history it seems like it was actually quite significant; a part of me feels like it should have been the de facto word processor instead of Word.
[1] Not counting the hand me down Commodore 64 I got as a pretty young kid.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#26The WordPerfect story as told by an early executive, Pete Peterson: http://www.wordplace.com/ap/almostperfect.pdf
This one and Sid Meier's "Memoir!" are two of my favourite software dev stories. Both are quick easy reads / and from the same era... code-nostalgia and hard- business mixed together.
"The Autodesk File
Bits of History, Words of Experience":
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#27The WordPerfect story as told by an early executive, Pete Peterson: http://www.wordplace.com/ap/almostperfect.pdf
The things that were possible in 1980, when you could work mornings in a grocery store making FOUR dollars an hour, covering your house payment (with a large garden!) because your drapery business is failing.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#28WordPerfect 5.x, running on DOS, is/was the best work processor ever. WordPerfect indeed.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#29WordPerfect really was an outstanding word processor. Reveal codes (like many others here have pointed out) made "debuging" formatting issues relatively painless as was the "make it fit to a certain layout or size" feature. In an era when you didn't really have WYSIWYG they did an excellent job of enabling users to more or less get nice looking output without having to go to TeX.
I remember it took a LONG time before there was a Windows version of WordPerfect which I think took a lot of their momentum away. Combine that with Microsoft basically giving away Office or bundling Word+Excel they succeeded in eroding market share from Lotus / WordPerfect.
I think the Lotus Suite may have even pre-dated MSFT Office as a suite (not 100% certain) and as usual functionality was often superior or better implemented than MSFT's.
Credit should also go to WordPerfect for making a Linux version in the 2000's before Linux desktop was as mature as it is today. Sadly they didn't continue this effort.
I'm glad we have LibreOffice but it's frankly a clone of MSFT Office, the UI is very cluttered and it has the same "weirdisms" that Office has.
Re: Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died
#30This makes me sadder than I thought it would. My first computer [1] didn't have Microsoft Word on it, but it had WordPerfect installed with the OEM Windows. I've always had really horrid handwriting so I preferred to type out all my homework since I was twelve or so, so I had to use whatever I could to do so, and WordPerfect was there. I grew to actually really like it, and I used it for about two years until my hard…
I somehow memorized most of the function key combos for wordperfect when in high school. And it wasn't like I was doing loads of reports for school. I guess it was a combination of there not being much else to do with the PC I had than playing the few (copied) games I had and fiddling with my copy of Wordperfect 5.1 (my neighbor who taught using it, supplied it). In any case, bored as I was, I explored a lot of the feature set and wrapped my head around features I would never use. Like creating mailings. I don't think I've ever actually had to create one. But it was there so I dove into it. For the post-internet generation, this is how you would create snail mail spam campaign in the early nineties. Merge a list of addressees with a letter with the right codes and then print personalized letters.
I also had a hand me down commodore 64 before that. My uncle donated this when he got his first PC. I taught myself basic on that. And with a few peeks and pokes managed a simple game even. Alas, I had no disk drive and never thought to actually save my creations anywhere. Like on the tape drive I did have. The commodore 64 was great though. And my uncle bundled some introductory computer science stuff with it (a primer on bits and bytes) that along with the excellent C64 manual went a long way to got me into programming. My local library was useless. I had no access to information. There was no internet (at least not accessible to me; I had not even heard of it). But that C64 manual got me curious and I had nothing better to do. I did not realize it at the time but that bit of commodore 64 documentation and computer science intro is what changed my life.
The PC I got after that was relatively boring because it did not include anything useful in terms of documentation. Starved of information, I dove into Wordperfect.