WordPerfect (WP) is a word processing application, now owned by Corel,[2] with a long history on multiple personal computer platforms. At the height of its popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the dominant player in the word-processor market, displacing the prior market leader WordStar.
It was originally developed under contract at Brigham Young University for use on a Data General minicomputer in the late 1970s. The authors retained the rights to the program, forming Utah-based Satellite Software International (SSI) in 1979 to sell it; it first came to market under the name SSI*WP in March 1980.[3] It moved to the operating system MS-DOS in 1982, by which time the name WordPerfect was in use,[3] and several greatly updated versions quickly followed. The application's feature list was considerably more advanced than its main competition WordStar, an established program based on the operating system CP/M that failed to transition successfully onto MS-DOS, which replaced CP/M. Satellite Software International changed its name to the WordPerfect Corporation in 1985.[3]
WordPerfect gained praise for its "look of sparseness" and clean display.[4] It rapidly displaced most other systems, especially after the 4.2 release in 1986, and it became the standard in the DOS market by version 5.1 in 1989. Its early popularity was based partly on its availability for a wide variety of computers and operating systems, and also partly because of extensive, no-cost support, with "hold jockeys" entertaining users while waiting on the phone.[5]
Its dominant position ended after a failed release for Microsoft Windows, followed by a long delay before introducing an improved version, and Microsoft Word was introduced at the same time in a superior version. Word rapidly took over the market, helped by aggressive bundling deals that ultimately produced Microsoft Office, and WordPerfect was no longer the standard by the mid-1990s. WordPerfect Corporation was sold to Novell in 1994, which then sold the product to Corel in 1996. Corel has made regular releases to the product since then, often in the form of office suites under the WordPerfect name that include the Quattro Pro spreadsheet, Presentations slides formatter, and other applications.
The common filename extension of WordPerfect document files is .wpd. Older versions of WordPerfect also used file extensions .wp, .wp7, .wp6, .wp5, .wp4, and originally no extension at all.[6]
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS
In 1979, Brigham Young University graduate student Bruce Bastian and computer science professor Alan Ashton[7] created word processing software for a Data General minicomputer system owned by the city of Orem, Utah. Bastian and Ashton retained ownership of the software that they created. They then founded Satellite Software International, Inc., to market the program to other Data General users. WordPerfect 1.0 represented a significant departure from the previous Wang standard for word processing.
The first version of WordPerfect for the IBM PC was released the day after Thanksgiving in 1982. It was sold as WordPerfect 2.20, continuing the version numbering from the Data General program.[8] Over the next several months, three more minor releases arrived, mainly to correct bugs.
The developers had hoped to program WordPerfect in C, but at this early stage there were no C compilers available for the IBM PC and they had to program it in x86 assembly language. All versions of WordPerfect up to 5.0 were written in x86, and C was only adopted with WP 5.1 when it became necessary to convert it to non-IBM compatible computers. The use of straight assembly language and a high amount of direct screen access gave WordPerfect a significant performance advantage over WordStar, which used strictly DOS API functions for all screen and keyboard access and was often very slow. In addition, WordStar, created for the CP/M operating system in which subdirectories are not supported, was extremely slow in switching to support sub-directories in MS-DOS.[9][10]
In 1983, WordPerfect 3.0 was released for DOS. This was updated to support DOS 2.x, sub-directories, and hard disks. It also expanded printer support, where WordPerfect 2.x only supported Epson and Diablo printers that were hard-coded into the main program. Adding support for additional printers this way was impractical, so the company introduced printer drivers, a file containing a list of control codes for each model of printer. Version 3.0 had support for 50 different printers, and this was expanded to 100 within a year. WordPerfect also supplied an editor utility that allowed users to make their own printer drivers or to modify the included ones.[3] Antic magazine observed that "WordPerfect is almost unusable without its manual of over 600 pages!"[11] A version of WordPerfect 3.0 became the Editor program of WordPerfect Office.
At its peak, WordPerfect Corporation occupied this seven-building campus in Orem, Utah, at the foothills of the Wasatch Range
WordPerfect 4.0 was released in 1984.[3] WordPerfect 4.2, released in 1988, introduced automatic paragraph numbering which was important to law offices, and automatic numbering and placement of footnotes and endnotes that were important to law offices and academics. It became the first program to overtake the original market leader WordStar in a major application category on the DOS platform.
By 1987, Compute! magazine described WordPerfect as "a standard in the MS-DOS world" and "a powerhouse program that includes almost everything".[12] In November 1989, WordPerfect Corporation released the program's most successful version WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, which was the first version to include pull-down menus to supplement the traditional function key combinations, support for tables, a spreadsheet-like feature, and full support for typesetting options such as italic, redline, and strike-through. This version also included "print preview", a graphical representation of the final printed output that became the foundation for WordPerfect 6.0's graphic screen editing. WordPerfect 5.1+ for DOS was introduced to allow older DOS-based PCs to utilize the new WordPerfect 6 file format. This version could read and write WordPerfect 6 files, included several 3rd-party screen and printing applications (previously sold separately), and provided several minor improvements.
WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS, released in 1993, could switch between its traditional text-based display mode and a graphical display mode that showed the document as it would print out known as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).[13] The previous text-based versions used different colors or text color inversions to indicate various markups and a graphic mode only for an uneditable print preview that used generic fonts rather than the actual fonts that appeared on the printed page.
By the time WordPerfect 6.0 was released, the company had grown "to command more than 60 percent of the word processing software market."[7]