WordPerfect

WordPerfect (WP) is a word processing application, now owned by Corel. 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. It was then ported to the MS-DOS operating system in 1982, by which time the name WordPerfect was in use, 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. WordPerfect gained praise for its "look of sparseness" and clean display. 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). 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...