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A bit of history . . .
First, I began with WordPerfect in the 80s (!), in DOS, at version 4.0, a product of Satellite Software, when I reviewed it as a technical editor of a national (at the time) magazine. I didn't like it, because it seemed incomplete -- it didn't use the full keyboard very well, and it seemed caught between the old WordStar control-key feature option and something that worked fairly well. When version 4.1 came out, fully updated, I switched to WP, stayed with it through every upgrade and the move to Windows, and still have it available for my personal work on every computer I use. I became a "WordPerfect Certified Resource" along the way, and made a few bucks supporting users who wanted to do sophisticated and complicated things with it (although I was never paid by WordPerfect). I mention all of this just so nobody accuses me of being a shill.
WordPerfect began as a product on minicomputers in the very late 70s, before "personal computers" were a viable option. It did not have many user-friendly features at that inauspicious start, but it was designed even then in a coherent way, prepared for growth. As desktop hardware came along, it was ported and soon enough left the original platform behind. At version 4.1, where I liked it well enough to use it, WP took FULL advantage of the keyboard and function keys -- when nobody else really had bothered with that -- and was the killer app of it's time on that alone. Reveal Codes was there too, even then. And Word was only a gleam in some geek's eye, before Microsoft bought up enough tech operations to gain the skill to make any useful word processor at all.
What should be mentioned is that WordPerfect routinely introduced the features that users used, and liked, and Word eventually coopted just about every one. Except Reveal Codes, which is only in the past decade been rather clumsily, and incompletely, cloned. Apparently it just isn't that easy to tear out the insanity of hidden tricks in favor of transparency, even for Redmond. WordPerfect introduced a workable "office" package in the very early 90s, first on the market that actually worked, although by that time Novell moved in and the ubergeeks managed to mangle the thing.
The path of WP through Novell, where it nearly died, to Corel, where it was essentially used as a come-on for other products, or a near-freebie in the wave of crapware placed on new boxes, and eventually replaced with a Word Clone -- the entire elegant original interface has been scrapped to make it run like Word, down to just about every feature -- is a sad thing to have watched. That same miserable process has afflicted the rest of related packages in the "office" set, to the point that they offer no real competition in terms of functionality to the Borg.
I use Word these days for almost everything, and Excel, and Access. I live in the real world, not some delusion of the past. I get things done reasonably well with them. But I do miss the drive and sparkle and leadership of WordPerfect, in this cookie cutter world. And every now and again, when I start a new document or a new project, I fire up the old girl for one more whirl, and she still dances like a pro.
There's no real point in comparing WP, or the other apps, to anything, not any more. It sounds nice, but they look almost the same, work almost exactly the same, and offer little in the way of differentiation to make a choice meaningful. Sad.
WordPerfect began as a product on minicomputers in the very late 70s, before "personal computers" were a viable option. It did not have many user-friendly features at that inauspicious start, but it was designed even then in a coherent way, prepared for growth. As desktop hardware came along, it was ported and soon enough left the original platform behind. At version 4.1, where I liked it well enough to use it, WP took FULL advantage of the keyboard and function keys -- when nobody else really had bothered with that -- and was the killer app of it's time on that alone. Reveal Codes was there too, even then. And Word was only a gleam in some geek's eye, before Microsoft bought up enough tech operations to gain the skill to make any useful word processor at all.
What should be mentioned is that WordPerfect routinely introduced the features that users used, and liked, and Word eventually coopted just about every one. Except Reveal Codes, which is only in the past decade been rather clumsily, and incompletely, cloned. Apparently it just isn't that easy to tear out the insanity of hidden tricks in favor of transparency, even for Redmond. WordPerfect introduced a workable "office" package in the very early 90s, first on the market that actually worked, although by that time Novell moved in and the ubergeeks managed to mangle the thing.
The path of WP through Novell, where it nearly died, to Corel, where it was essentially used as a come-on for other products, or a near-freebie in the wave of crapware placed on new boxes, and eventually replaced with a Word Clone -- the entire elegant original interface has been scrapped to make it run like Word, down to just about every feature -- is a sad thing to have watched. That same miserable process has afflicted the rest of related packages in the "office" set, to the point that they offer no real competition in terms of functionality to the Borg.
I use Word these days for almost everything, and Excel, and Access. I live in the real world, not some delusion of the past. I get things done reasonably well with them. But I do miss the drive and sparkle and leadership of WordPerfect, in this cookie cutter world. And every now and again, when I start a new document or a new project, I fire up the old girl for one more whirl, and she still dances like a pro.
There's no real point in comparing WP, or the other apps, to anything, not any more. It sounds nice, but they look almost the same, work almost exactly the same, and offer little in the way of differentiation to make a choice meaningful. Sad.
Posted by semi-adult
17th Dec
