WordPerfect for DOS

~ the obituary ~

wordperfect for dos was the dominant word processor of the 1980s pc office. bruce bastian and alan ashton wrote the original in 1979 at brigham young university for a data general minicomputer, ported it to the ibm pc in november 1982, and rode 5.1 from 1989 into the office tier the way lotus 1-2-3 rode the spreadsheet. by version 6.0 the product had more than sixty percent of the worldwide word processor market. by 1995 it briefly held more than half the world. then windows 95 shipped, word for windows turned out to be the default in every office bundle, and the dos product ran out of runway. wordperfect 6.2 for dos was released january 1 1997. the corel wordperfect suite for dos followed on february 18. that was the end of native dos development. corel kept building a december 1997 build internally and decided not to ship it.

the cultural memory of wordperfect for dos is the f-key layer cake. f1 for cancel. f3 for help. f7 for exit. f10 for save. a plastic template strip on top of the keyboard that mapped the function keys to commands, because there was no menu bar to point at and no mouse to point with. reveal codes, the lower window that showed the actual formatting tags inside your text, was the feature law firms refused to give up for twenty years after the rest of the world moved on. some of them are still on it.

i did not type my first papers on wordperfect for dos. i was thirteen when 6.2 shipped, online by the end of 1998 on a turkish 33.6k modem, and the word processors i grew up around were already word for windows on the office machines i had access to. wordperfect in turkey in the 1990s was something corporate or government people had, not something a kid in a home in ankara typed his school assignments in. the version of wordperfect i actually saw later was the corel windows one, in a corel-suite cd-rom box, and it was already losing.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

wordperfect 5.1 was the version that made the product universal. it shipped in 1989, ran in 384k of ram, supported a printer driver library that was wider than anything microsoft offered at the time, and had a function-key shortcut layer that secretaries and lawyers memorized to the point of muscle memory. through the early 1990s the entire question of which word processor your office used was effectively answered by your dos version. the answer was almost always wordperfect.

~ the postmortem ~

the company missed windows. wordperfect for windows 5.1 shipped in november 1991, more than two years after windows 3.0, and the first release was widely considered slow and underbaked. microsoft word for windows had been shipping since 1989 and had the home-court advantage of being made by the company that made windows. office 4.0 in 1993 bundled word with the other microsoft apps for a price wordperfect corporation could not match alone. novell bought wordperfect for 1.4 billion dollars in 1994 and sold it to corel for 186 million in 1996, a six-to-one writedown in eighteen months. the corel ownership shipped 6.2 for dos and then walked away from the platform.

~ the long tail ~

wordperfect for dos has a small support community that refuses to die. mendelson's wpdos site has been maintaining patches and emulator configurations since the early 2000s. law firms in the us still use it because the document-archive problem of converting decades of pleadings to a new format is harder than just keeping the old setup running. the dos version's reveal codes is also better than any equivalent in modern word processors, which is the one thing the holdouts are right about. corel's modern wordperfect office for windows still ships as a paid product, but the dos line ended in 1997 and never came back.

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