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WordPerfect (WP) is a word processing application, now owned by Alludo,[3] with a long history on multiple personal computer platforms. At the height of its popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the market leader of word processors, 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 the Utah-based Satellite Software International (SSI) in 1979 to sell it; the program first came to market under the name SSI*WP in March 1980.[4] It then moved to the MS-DOS operating system in 1982, by which time the name WordPerfect was in use,[4] 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 WordPerfect Corporation in 1985.[4]
WordPerfect gained praise for its "look of sparseness" and clean display.[5] 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.[6]
Its dominant position ended after a failed release for Microsoft Windows; the company blamed the failure on Microsoft for not initially sharing its Windows Application Programming Interface (API) specifications, causing the application to be slow. After receiving the Windows APIs, there was a long delay in reprogramming before introducing an improved version. Microsoft Word had been introduced at the same time as their first attempt, and Word took over the market because it was faster, and was promoted by aggressive bundling deals that ultimately produced Microsoft Office. WordPerfect was no longer a popular standard by the mid-1990s. WordPerfect Corporation was sold to Novell in 1994, which then sold the product to Corel in 1996. Corel (since rebranded as Alludo) 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, the Presentations slides formatter, and other applications.
In 1979, Brigham Young University graduate student Bruce Bastian and computer science professor Alan Ashton[8] 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.[9] 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.[10][11]
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 fifty different printers, and this was expanded to one hundred within a year. WordPerfect also supplied an editor utility that allowed users to make their own printer drivers, or to modify the included ones.[4] Antic magazine observed, that "WordPerfect is almost unusable without its manual of over 600 pages!"[12] A version of WordPerfect 3.0 became the Editor program of WordPerfect Office.
WordPerfect 4.0 was released in 1984.[4] WordPerfect 4.2, released in 1986, introduced automatic paragraph numbering, which was important to law offices, and automatic numbering and placement of footnotes and endnotes that were important both 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".[13] 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 third-party screen and printing applications (previously sold separately), and provided several minor improvements.
WordPerfect Corporation acquired Reference Software International, makers of Grammatik, a highly popular grammar checker for DOS, in January 1993 for $19 million.[14][15] RSI's remaining employees were absorbed into WordPerfect in Orem, and the functionality of Grammatik and Reference Set (a spell checker that RSI also sold) were eventually integrated into WordPerfect.[16] WordPerfect continued selling Grammatik as a standalone product for several years.[15]
WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS, released in 1993, could switch between its traditional text-based mode and a graphical mode that showed the document as it would print out, known as WYSIWYG (what you see iswhat you get).[17] WordPerfect 5 had introduced an graphic view mode that displayed the layout of the document on a page using generic fonts, but the view mode was ineditable. The editing still needed to be done in text mode.
The ease of use of tools, like Mail Merge[18] (combine form documents with data from any data source), "Print as booklet", and tables (with spreadsheet capabilities and the possibility to generate graphs) are also notable.
The WordPerfect document format allows continuous extending of functionality without jeopardizing backward and forward compatibility. Despite the fact that the newer version is extremely rich in functionality, WordPerfect X5 documents are fully compatible with WordPerfect 6.0a documents in both directions. The older program simply ignores the "unknown" codes, while rendering the known features of the document. WordPerfect users were never forced to upgrade for compatibility reasons for more than two decades.
A key to their design is its streaming code architecture that parallels the formatting features of HTML and Cascading Style Sheets. Documents are created much the same way that raw HTML pages are written, with text interspersed by tags (called "codes") that trigger treatment of data until a corresponding closing tag is encountered, at which point the settings active to the point of the opening tag resume control. As with HTML, tags can be nested. Some data structures are treated as objects within the stream as with HTML's treatment of graphic images, e.g., footnotes and styles, but the bulk of a WordPerfect document's data and formatting codes appear as a single continuous stream. A difference between HTML tags and WordPerfect codes is that HTML codes can all be expressed as a string of plain text characters delimited by greater-than and less-than characters, e.g. text, whereas WordPerfect formatting codes consist of hexadecimal values.
The addition of styles and style libraries in WP 5.0 provided greatly increased power and flexibility in formatting documents, while maintaining the streaming-code architecture of earlier versions. Styles are a preset arrangement of settings having to do with things like fonts, spacings, tab stops, margins and other items having to do with text layout. Styles can be created by the user to shortcut the setup time when starting a new document, and they can be saved in the program's style library. Prior to that, its only use of styles was the Opening Style, which contained the default settings for a document.
After the purchase of the desktop publishing program Ventura, Corel enhanced the WordPerfect styles editor and styles behavior with the majority of Ventura's capabilities. This improved the usability and performance of graphic elements like text boxes, document styles, footer and header styles.
Since WordPerfect has been enriched with properties from the CorelDraw Graphics suite, graphic styles are editable. The Graphics Styles editor enables customizing the appearance of boxes, borders, lines and fills and store the customized design for reuse. The possibilities include patterns and color gradients for fills; corner, endpoint, pen-type and thickness for lines. Box styles can be used as container style, including a border, lines, fill, text and caption; each with its separate style. A text box style shows that WordPerfect cascades its styles.
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