A look back: WordPerfect on DOS (2023)

It was the best of times (WP5.1) and the worst of times (first versions for Windows). I used WordPerfect for DOS 5.1 extensively and it was a joy to use. It was not WYSIWYG, but it was fast, stable, and very capable. A couple of years later I used one of the early versions of WordPerfect for Windows (I don't recall the version number) and it was a complete disaster. It crashed very often. Hence, my love/hate with WordPerfect.

An interesting thing about WordPerfect was that most of the keyboard shortcuts were built around the row of function keys at the top of the keyboard, so they were difficult to remember, compared to modern keyboard shortcuts. For this reason, nearly every WordPerfect user I knew had a little piece of plastic or laminated paper that they placed above the row of function keys that listed all of the keyboard shortcuts on it to help them remember.

The shortcut strip came in the box! And it was all based on F1-F12 and modifier keys alt/ctrl/shift. It was a complete pain to learn, but once you knew a few key ones (F10 was save?), it was very fast to work with. I wasn't very old, but I remember having the same kind of muscle memory then with WP5.0/5.1 that I do now with vim. Autosave wasn't a thing, so hitting F10 often was just done out of habit.

But, by far the best part was that you could reveal all of the formatting codes, so you could see exactly how something was styled. It was much like editing HTML by hand, and easier to figure out how something was styled than with almost any WYSIWYG.

Here’s a photo of what it looked like: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1aemcxc/80s_word_perf...

Losing Reveal Codes was the worst part of Microsoft forcing Word down everyone's throat. Word positively sucks in comparison to this day. No, the little "paragraph" icon isn't enough. Reveal Codes showed you in granular form what was going on so you could fix what was borked, instead of ping-ponging back and forth in AutoComplete hell.

And it wasn't just on the DOS version. WordPerfect for Windows has/had it too along with the modern WYSIWYG UI.

The function keys were no more difficult to use than any other key shortcut. However since keyboards had that space they put the chart there and so could find the less commonly used commands. Everyone quickly learned which key was save, but there were many many others that they didn't use and so they didn't know - but if they wanted it they could look at the chart and find it.

GUIs are more discoverable (when done well), but DOS didn't really have a GUI option, so this was a second best. VI and emacs users sometimes print shortcut charts as well.

WordPerfect shipped with printed templates/overlays and a wonderful printed manual.

There weren’t any standard key combinations yet…except maybe Wordstar?… because word processors still had very very low adoption and many many users spent all day in WordPerfect so there was a lot of muscle memory.

Back then software was optimized for expertise not casual use…and priced accordingly. WordPerfect was about four hundred 1980’s dollars a seat, not 99p in an app store.

Most modern keyboard shortcuts are mnemonic such as Ctrl-S for Save, which makes them easier to remember than function keys.

As a function key hater - hated it. WordStar for me!

Does anyone use function keys for word processors on modern interfaces? As far as I can see they are all used for media/screen controls.

Assuming you speak English.

WordPerfect was like vi: forbidding entry point, difficult key bindings, and a joy to use once you got it.

Word for Windows even had a mode that replicated the plain blue screen and behavior of WP5.1 for a few years, which I still miss.

WP also ran on the UNIX of the day, with look and feel very much like the DOS version. Tavis Ormandy got it working on Linux[0].

[0] https://github.com/taviso/wpunix?tab=readme-ov-file

I think it's interesting how modern TUI apps never seem to look as nice as mid-80s DOS apps like WordPerfect or Lotus 123. I wonder if it's the blue background.

I remember sitting in front of WordPerfect for many, many hours as a teenager, writing essays and whatnot for school. We were fortunate to have an HP LaserJet at home that my dad used for work. The output looked great and WordPefect’s interface wasn’t terribly hard to get used to.

My more sophisticated friend had Windows 3.1 and blew my mind with the WISIWYG capabilities of early versions of Word.

Ironically, I now do much of my writing in vi.

The reason for the horrible Windows version was threefold: 1) Culture, 2) Hubris and 3) OS/2.

From Almost Perfect [1], the book linked to in the article:

> WordPerfect Corporation was not a platform for personal achievement, a career ladder to other opportunities, or a challenging opportunity for personal improvement. The company did not put the needs of the individual ahead of its own. The company was not concerned about an employee's personal feelings, except as they related to the company's well-being.

> WordPerfect Corporation was not intended to be a social club for the unproductive. While other companies might condone many personal or social activities at the office, ours did not. Things like celebrating birthdays, throwing baby showers, collecting for gifts, selling Tupperware or Avon, managing sports tournaments, running betting pools, calling home to keep a romance alive or hand out chores to the children, gossiping or flirting with co-workers, getting a haircut, going to a medical or dental appointment, running to the cafeteria for a snack, coming in a little late or leaving a little early, taking Friday afternoon off, and griping about working conditions were all inappropriate when done on company time. Even though these activities were condoned by many businesses across the country, we felt there was no time for them at WordPerfect Corporation.

Sounds like a lovely place to work! Oof. Compare this to Apple or Microsoft or a ton of other Silicon Valley companies. It's no wonder they couldn't find developers:

> In January [1990] Microsoft offered to make us a beta test site for Windows 3.0. We accepted their generous offer, but did little more than look Windows over. In hindsight, it is easy to see we should have done much more right away. At the time, we could justify not doing a Windows 2.0 version in favor of completing WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, but it is now difficult to defend our further delays. Unfortunately, we did not have any experienced Windows programmers inside the company to form a development team, and there were not many outside the company to recruit.

> In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.

> May 31, 1990 was a sad day in WordPerfect Corporation's history. I wrote a press release announcing that we were postponing our OS/2 product, so we could produce a Windows version of WordPerfect as quickly as possible. I wrote, "While we still are strong supporters of OS/2, we have decided to test and release the Windows version of WordPerfect before the OS/2 version. The reasons for the schedule change have to do with the expected delays in version 2.0 of Presentation Manager and particular requests from our customers. This change should move up the release of our Windows product by three to four months and will delay our release of a PM product by four or five months."

The book is free online and pretty interesting if you like histories of early computing. It's definitely on the list with the more famous ones like Soul of a New Machine.

1. http://www.wordplace.com/ap/

I wonder if it's "responsive design" i.e. variable terminal sizes versus the fixed size DOS terminal.

At some point OpenOffice decided that the shortcut to save was Ctrl-G because my locale was set to Spanish ("guardar").

I don't remember the details, but the function key shortcuts changed enough between WP4.2 and 5.1 to slow me down. May have been the first time I grumbled about a SW update breaking my workflow. Some things never change.

> function keys were no more difficult to use than any other key shortcut

That's a bold statement. I think most users would disagree, and the voted with their feet/fingers, and UI designers seem to agree.

Why? Some guesses: Nothing about F# indicates what it does, making it hard to learn; ctrl+S makes sense. And after you learn it, few can touch type function keys which means, 1) you have to look away from the document and, 2) there's much less muscle memory involved.

> WordPerfect was like vi: forbidding entry point, difficult key bindings, and a joy to use once you got it.

Maybe in that way, but I think it's misleading to say a every keyboard-based non-GUI editor is essentially similar. Vi's appeal is the muscle memory of complex commands, because of the moded keyboard - one mode being character insert, the other being commands.

Didn't WP use function keys + accelerator keys? That's almost the opposite of Vi's efficiency and muscle-memory.

ui designers moved graphicics for good reason. conrotl-s makes sense - now what is the shortcut that makes sense for any of the other thousand things someone wants to do in word processor? There will always be some that don't make sense.

Using F-keys for the most shortcuts was standard across DOS apps. As far as discoverability, the common UI pattern was to show a single row of function key labels on the bottom of the screen (and update it when the user pressed and held Shift/Ctrl/Alt to allow for combinations), often with an option in settings to hide it once the user has gotten accustomed to the shortcuts.

I don't recall any issues touch typing F-keys, either, especially on typical keyboards from that era which had the entire row split into groups of 4, making it easy to find the right key without ever looking.

I'm not sure what you mean by "much less muscle memory involved" wrt F-keys. I still, to this day, have muscle memory of F2=save from using Norton/Midnight Commander so much.

As a function key lover - what do you hate about keys whose function is to perform a function?

On Windows, there are some F-key shortcuts that are universal across apps (that follow the platform UI guidelines). In particular, F3 is Find Next.

My Dad still uses WordPerfect on his windows XP machine. He recently called me up because he wants to convert one of his "books" into a resizable EPUB.

I feel like this legacy format might be the death of me. The USB is in the mail (Dad doesn't even know dropbox exists, gulp).

I am becoming very nostalgic about word processors before around 2003. Back then, they were very predictable, made sense to me, and had all the features I wanted. The latest Word version makes all kinds of wacky choices for formatting, and I can't figure out how to fix them. Numbering is off, and formatting often is totally unpredictable. Not sure what's going on, but I really want Word 2000 back.

OS and hardware designers seem to agree function keys were a good idea. And have extended them as one click short cuts for brightness, airplane mode, opening your calculator, and all other kinds of things.

Word can open a WPD file, just fine. If you change the extension to doc, it'll load in. Which also means you can open it in LibreOffice, or use Pandoc or whatever else you would usually reach for. [1]

WordPerfect's format is a subset of Word's original.

Though, if you want to nerdsnipe yourself, the format is also documented [2], and there's a few libraries here and there for parsing it.

[1] Well, almost. The Mac-versions of WordPerfect aren't a subset of Word. See the spec docs.

[2] https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats//fdd/fdd000...

Takes me away from the main keyboard - I much prefer Ctrl-X rather than Fn-X. And as I asked before, do you still use function keys with modern interfaces? And if so, which one(s)?

And have you ever seen (or used) one of the insane keyboards that were used to manage IBM mainframes and super-minis?

Yes, but on modern laptops at least, F3 does something like Volume-Up, unless you switch the sense of the keys - which of course you can do, but I much prefer them doing the media control stuff.

It's even worse than you expect!

Around 2000 i found that if you have document with header/footer with auto page numbers and merge it with few pages from other document also with page numbers you get huge mess in numbering.

Some weird happens like: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, (here is doc N:2) 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, (continues doc N:1) 7, 8, 9

And you can't just reset page numbers, because you need to be on inserted page and there to do reset.

Might be true for saving, but there are far too many shortcuts. What makes it easier to remember that Ctrl+X is cut and Ctrl+V is paste?

I did in fact, used AS/400 growing up in my mum's office and then later as an internship. And it was so powerful.

With muscle memory, you could just F2, F5, F3 combos, press tab twice and start typing [1]. The systems used were the precursor to SAP.

Function keys are really powerful. Ctrl+x works, but do these type of ctrl+letter shortcuts all day and you're guaranteed some wrist problems in a few years [2].

As a software engineer, I still put start debug on F5, end debug on F8 and used most of the other keys as well. It's interesting because that comes from my early days as a developer in DOS and then Windows. I now work on macOS though. One of the first things I change on macOS is having permanently the function keys active.

[1] arguably the main issue today is our reliance of graphical UI for repetitive work. The fact that you have to look and drag the mouse before clicking and then move your hands to your keyboard to actually type words, is insanely poor.

[2] if you're referring to the `fn` key on modern keyboard, we're then in agreeance, these are awful.

Ctrl-S is for search !

Reveal Codes made learning HTML so easy for me back in the day. It was the same idea, just different codes.

Well, my experience with an IBM operators console was back in the mid-80s with a twin 4381 setup. It was sometimes more convenient for me to set up a big print job at the main site which had a high performance printer (I actually wrote a multi-site print spooling service in ReXX earlier, but it was more efficient for big jobs (ha-ha for UK readers) to execute them directly).

Anyway, my experience - I am in Linda's office - Linda (system manager) is not in yet, the system console is just convenient:

Me: set up job, using normal keyboard commands, with my usual login, no special privileges.

Linda: (just comes in) What you doing?

Me: Don't get your knickers in a twist. And can you make me a coffee?

Linda: Aargh! OK (we were friends), but don't press Button-B!

One of my many problems with function keys. Button-B would probably just have requested an operator to unmount a disk (or whatever), but who knows.

It’s both - no fixed window and suspicious use of color.

Now and then you find one still working well with thought in it. But it’s rare.

The modern terminal could be amazing with Unicode support and 16 million colors …

Ctrl-X for cut because scissors form an 'x' if you squint hard enough?

Me too! I have shared this point with several people over the years and none understood this. I guess I was a WordPerfect nerd.

Also Ctrl-V looks like 2 pieces of paper being pasted together.

I see you. There are dozens of us!

I still have a Word 2000 installer CD with the original box and product activation key. Wow what a great word processor! Simple, fast, intuitive, and packed with cool features. Modern versions are not fundamentally different, but at the same time are bloated and obtuse. It just doesn’t have that old school snappy feel, that somehow used to feel more responsive and performant on FAR less capable hardware.

XyWrite: hold my beer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XyWrite

XyWrite was hardcore.

> Using F-keys for the most shortcuts was standard across DOS apps.

That doesn't make it a good idea. In UI design, people don't say 'we're using this because it was used in 1980s DOS programs'.

You may find it to be fine - I don't mind function keys, but I they aren't nearly as efficient. But we're talking about the general public.

Better options didn't exist. Wordperfect was expected to work on a 4mhz computer with a low resoluion screen and be fast. f keys or contorl shortcuts - both were not good options but given the constraints fkeys are better - f keys had a place to put your cheet sheet.

I believe there was a GUI version of Word Perfect for X11 before Word Perfect for Windows existed and Word Perfect was an early user of Wine for Corel's port of Word Perfect for Windows to Linux in their abortive effort to go all in on linux on the desktop (also being an early proponent of arm on the desktop)

I'm not criticizing WordPerfect, though I wonder why they didn't use accelerator keys and the keyboard (e.g., ctrl+s) - or was that an option in WP?

Regardless, my point was that their keyboard UI wasn't as efficient as Vi. WP still made the right choice - no way the general public was learning Vi!