Talk:WordPerfect/Archives/2015

No mention of the obvious

Before 1992, WordPerfect was almost synonymous with word processing. It had massive market share and training in WordPerfect was almost job one for anyone using a personal computer in business. When Microsoft Windows began to become the platform of choice in the early 90s, WordPerfect was understandably slow to develop a Windows version of their product, and it left open a big void and opportunity for Microsoft Word for Windows (Microsoft's new word processor).

It may have been understandable for WordPerfect to ignore Windows at first, but certainly not wise in retrospect. As a grad student at that time, I can attest that Wordperfect for Windows was far behind Microsoft Word for Windows at that time. By the time WordPerfect corporation "woke up" to the need to develop a good Windows version, it was too late.

I started my master's thesis on Wordperfect for DOS in 1992, and moved it to WordPerfect for Windows. Endless problems were the result. Graphs and charts were messed up and it seemed that 12 pages was about the limit of its capability. I ended up nearly recreating my entire thesis on Microsoft Word for Windows.

It's hard to mention a better candidate for winner of the best "what were they thinking" award for the 1990s. To lose a near-monopoly market share in less than 2 years is surely some sort of record. Landroo 14:18, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Furthermore, as a Service bureau manager...in 1984~1992, the reason we kept the old version of WordPerfect? Not a clue here except for the mention of the DOJ. Lawyers got tears in their eyes because it could print legal briefs on legal sized paper. Show me Office 2007 doing that. ( It can, but to get it right, you have to mess with a whole host of settings ). Service bureaus made a lot of bread an butter money from law students and lawyers wanting to print their briefs. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.193.2.115 (talk) 10:47, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

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I couldn't agree more. Your point should be mentioned somewhere. Even after all my years in the industry, I still am amazed by this singular blunder. Talk about dropping the ball. WPC sure did. Damn shame. And still, nothing's quite as good. - KitchM (talk) 00:54, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Is it just me, or do I remember a WP upgrade that would have happened about 1990/91, where in the previous version (maybe 4.1) ALT-F7 was "save file" and in the next version (maybe 4.2), the ALT-F7 was "delete current file". They actually HURT their dedicated users, who were used to using a keystroke for "save" and remapping the same keystroke to "delete". I could be wrong, but that's what I remember 216.69.46.14 (talk) 15:56, 16 April 2015 (UTC)stevestoneky

Configurability of WP-DOS

As a very intensive user of WP-DOS (3.0-5.1+) I would like to suggest that the main (and unique) characteristic of WP was not Reveal Codes or any other individual feature of the program, but its extreme configurability. As the existing article states, the macro language allowed you to design entire programs that performed complex operations with a text. Add to this the ability (which goes unmentioned in the article) to assign any value or macro to any key (including the "dead" 5 on the numeric keypad without NumLock on), and you get a program that allows its entire interface to completely reconfigured. I know, because I did it. No mainline consumer program I've ever heard of has allowed this. It represents an entirely different vision of what not only a word processing program, but any program, can be. Unfortunately, this vision was not very well marketed and very incompletely documented. Still, I think, it deserves a place in the history of computing, and thus in Wikipedia. It shows just how far you can go without a mouse or GUI. Thus, my own redesign of WP converted the entire hard-to-remember-the-function-key-driven WP menu system into a simple and logical ASCII-graphical-pull-down menu system operated only with the (reorganized) arrow keys of the numeric keypad, with just few common editing commands assigned to the most accessible function keys. WP could very well itself have designed a number of different interfaces of this kind, adapted to the needs of different user groups, thus producing, in effect, a range of different programs resting on the same base. Today, the contrary trend dominates: The rigid lack of configurability of Mac systems is increasingly copied in Windows, and even Linux. I believe Wikipedia could do us all a favor by preserving the memory of this potential in WP. Perhaps sometime it will inspire someone to design programs in this way again... Filursiax (talk) 01:36, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

WordPerfect for Mac, version 1: Before Mac OS 7

The article currently states that WordPerfect for Mac ran on Mac OS 7.0 thru 9.2.2. Actually, WordPerfect came out before what is now called Mac OS 7. Long ago, I learned WordPerfect version 1 on a Mac Plus running System 6. I recognize that this fact is a very minor point of trivia, because WordPerfect for Mac version 1 wasn't widely used. Oaklandguy (talk) 09:53, 18 December 2015 (UTC)