WordPerfect
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS
Bruce Bastian, a Brigham Young University (BYU) graduate student, and BYU computer science professor Dr. Alan Ashton designed a word processing system for the city of Orem's Data General minicomputer system in 1979. Bastian and Ashton kept the rights to the WordPerfect software they produced. The two founded Satellite Software International, Inc. of Orem, Utah, to market the program to other Data General users. WordPerfect 1.0represented 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, 1982. It was sold as "WordPerfect 2.20", continuing the version numbering from the Data General. Over the next several months, three more minor releases arrived mainly to correct bugs.
The developers had originally hoped to program WordPerfect in C, but at this early stage there were no decent C compilers available for the IBM PC. Most of the other programming languages then available were unsuited for the job, so they ultimately had to program it in x86 assembly language. All versions of WordPerfect up to 5.0 were written thus, and C was only adopted with WP 5.1 when it became necessary to cross-port it to non-IBM compatibles.
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 painfully slow. In addition, WordStar was extremely slow in switching to support for subdirectories.
In 1983, WordPerfect 3.0 for DOS came out. This was fully updated to support DOS 2.x and be able to use subdirectories and hard disks. It also provided a solution to the problem of printer support - WordPerfect 2.x only supported Epson and Diablo printers, which was also hard-coded into the main program executable. Adding support for additional printers this way was impractical, so the company introduced the novel feature of printer drivers, which essentially amounted to a file containing a list of control codes for each particular model of printer. Version 3.0 thus had support for 50 different printers and within a year, this was expanded to 100. WordPerfect also supplied an editor utility that allowed users to make their own printer drivers or modify the included ones. [5] During this time, the company considered adding copy protection to the program, but ultimately decided against it.[ citation needed] Antic observed that "WordPerfect Corp. doesn't need to worry too much about piracy: WordPerfect is almost unusable without its manual of over 600 pages!" [6]
Market share[ edit]While WordPerfect dominated the DOS market, Microsoft shifted its attention toward a Windows version of Word; after Windows 3.0 was introduced, Word's market share began to grow at an extraordinary rate. A Windows version of WordPerfect was not introduced until nearly two years after Windows 3.0, and was met with poor reviews. Word also benefited from being included in an integrated office suite package much sooner than WordPerfect. [15] While WordPerfect had more than 50% of the worldwide word-processing market in 1995, by 2000 Word had up to 95%; it was so dominant that WordPerfect executives admitted that their software needed to be compatible with Word documents to survive. [8]
en.wikipedia.org
Faithful customers[ edit]Among the remaining avid users of WordPerfect are many law firms and government offices, [8] which favor WordPerfect features such as macros, reveal codes, and the ability to access a large range of formatting options such as left-right block indent directly with key combinations rather than having to click through several layers of submenus as Microsoft Word often requires, the fact is that the user interface has stayed almost identical from WPWin 6 through WP X5 (2010) and that file formats have not changed, as incompatible new formats would require keeping both obsolete software versions and obsolete hardware around just to access a few old documents. Corel now caters to these markets, with, for example, a major sale to the United States Department of Justice in 2005. [16] A related factor is that WordPerfect Corporation was particularly responsive to feature requests from the legal profession, incorporating many features particularly useful to that niche market and those features have been continued in subsequent versions usually directly accessible with key combinations.
 |
