WordPerfect
| WordPerfect | |
|---|---|
 | |
 A document being edited in WordPerfect X3 | |
| Original authors | Brigham Young University Satellite Software International (SSI) |
| Developers | WordPerfect Corporation Novell Corel |
| Release | 1979 |
| Stable release | |
| Operating system | Windows 7 and later[2] Old versions: See § Version history |
| Platform | IA-32 |
| Type | Word processor |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | www |
| WordPerfect Corporation | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | 1979 in Orem, Utah |
| Founders | |
| Defunct | 1994 |
| Fate | Sold to Novell; most assets in turn sold to Corel in 1996 |
WordPerfect (WP) is a word processing application, now owned by Corel.[3] At the height of its popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the market leader of word processors, displacing the previous 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 was then ported 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. 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 superior functionality, availability for a wide variety of computers and operating systems, and also partly because of extensive, no-cost support (even eventually offering "hold jockeys" who entertained users while waiting on the phone).[6]
Its dominant position ended approximately two to three years after the first release for Microsoft Windows; the company reported Microsoft did not initially share its Windows Application Programming Interface (API) specifications, causing the WordPerfect for Windows application to be slow. After WordPerfect received 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 its first attempt, and while WordPerfect initially enjoyed the highest market share of word processors for Windows, in a matter of years, Word took over the market because it was faster, employed aggressive corporate sales contracts, and was promoted by aggressive bundling deals that ultimately produced Microsoft Office.
WordPerfect Corporation was sold to Novell in 1994, which then sold the product to Corel in 1996. WordPerfect was no longer a popular standard by the late '90s. 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, the 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.[7]
WordPerfect for DOS
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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, and founded Satellite Software International, Inc. (SSI) in 1980 to market the program to other Data General users.
WordPerfect 1.0 represented a significant departure from the previous Wang standard for word processing. By the end of the year SSI had 16 employees including W. E. "Pete" Peterson, hired as bookkeeper and office manager. Bastian worked as program manager while Ashton taught at BYU in the morning and worked on the software with his best students in the afternoon. Bastian and Ashton each owned 49.9% of the company, and Peterson—who became executive vice president, and actively managed the company—received 0.2% to break ties.[9]
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.[10] SSI's sales that year were $1 million.[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, originally created for the CP/M operating system, in which subdirectories are not supported, was slow to support sub-directories in MS-DOS.[11][12]
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 supports 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 has support for 50 different printers, and this was expanded to 100 within a year. WordPerfect also supplied an editor utility that allows users to make their own printer drivers, or to modify the included ones.[4] A version of WordPerfect 3.0 became the Editor program of WordPerfect Office.
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WordPerfect 4.0 was released in 1984;[4] by then WordPerfect was the third most-popular word processor, behind WordStar and MultiMate. WordPerfect 4.1 appeared in 1985, with versions for various non-PC compatibles such as