Also I’ve met two Danas that I can remember. Both were lovely people.
The kind of thing people bought computers for. You didn’t need a computer. You needed Word Perfect.
I still remember the little card you could put above the function keys on your keyboard that showed you what alt-F7 or ctrl-F9 did. Each modifier was a different color.
First program I remember seeing people really use on a computer when I was a kid.
It was also very unstable. I remember going to a friend's house to use his better computer and WordPerfect 6 to dress up a paper for school. It took hours longer than it should have due to the constant crashes. It was a very solid lesson in "save often" for teenage me.
I adored WordPerfect under DOS. The experience of WP6 for Windows was so bad that I switched to Word and never tried any future WP versions. Maybe they made it better in 7, but the damage was done.
http://xahlee.info/kbd/wordperfect_shortcuts_strip.html
And for context, this link has a picture of it on top of a keyboard (cropped):
https://luciamonterorodriguez.com/atajos-de-teclado-y-raton-...
When magazines reported, or OEMs advertised, that a particular computer had "100% IBM compatibility", generally there wasn't like a formal benchmark for this. It basically meant that the PC versions of Lotus and Flight Simulator ran fine on the machine.
I also remember in the late 90s, before StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice took off, WordPerfect had a resurgence on Linux, because there was a need for a word processor. I seem to recall a distro shipping with it prominently. Was it Corel Linux?
Word Perfect was like LaTeX and MS Word at the same time. You could edit text or you could edit the codes and there were no nasty surprises or any random reorganization of the document because you copy pasted something.
Also, by editing the codes you could dictate the precise way the document should look.
I think it was ahead of its time.
Sadly, WP 6.0 changed the macro language too much (they made everything an object and many features were lost) and it was not as successful as WP5.1, because you just don't make all the macros of your customers obsolete overnight.
5.1 was perfection, but the interface was text console. 6.0 was a complete redesign of … everything, and it was more a bad clone of MS Word than an improvement over WP 5.1.
I was trying to get across it was one of the juggernauts of the day. A program normal people knew about if you knew the names of any computer programs.
Perhaps it was the most popular for home users, I don’t know. I was far too young in its heyday.
As productivity software went though it was BIG.
Does anybody remember AMI Pro? I think that was where I first started to learn about "paragraph styles" and the disciplined way someone could use these WYSIWYG editors a bit like one can use LaTeX styles. Assign styles abstractly, then be able to change in one place and modify all occurrences throughout a document.
However, this just set me up for decades of frustration as the vast majority of business users cannot be bothered to use any discipline at all. Documents would be littered with overlapping bits of manual formatting that would drive me insane with their impossible interactions. And if they defined paragraph styles, it was as endless litter of new styles so that they were hardly ever reused.
It may be my Wordstar indoctrination coming through, but I think these tools would all be better with explicit markup for boundaries, so you could escape the madness of never being able to predict, "which implied style(s) are going to apply to the next character I type with the current cursor position?"
https://archive.org/details/janes-ah-64-d-longbow-95/keyboar...
Microsoft Word not only lacked Reveal Codes, it mocked it in an Easter egg in Word for Windows 2.0. Tells you what you need to know about Word, basically.
The vast majority of documents people write for within Google Docs’ limitations. I wouldn’t use it for a book or maybe a dissertation. But it works great for a lot of day to day internal business documents.
But if you’re going to have a niche market, that’s a pretty good niche. They care about formatting a lot and have a lot of money to spend if it helps them enough.
