I always disliked the name WordPerfect.
If it was so perfect why did they make 27 versions, 1 would have been enough 
reveal codes
After almost perfect reading I am so scared. I am managing my own company with my friend in Korea. My friend is a boss, and I am developing softwares and leading other two programmers. My friend and one another coworker sale our products to customers, we have 200 customers. and every customers pay fees per every month for use our software, so we have enough income to maintain our small company. our company is so small. so we donāt have any system to manage. My friend and me donāt have any job experience before starting our own business. we just have only CS degreeā¦ We donāt know any knowledge of management without several thin handbooks. and We want to know how to research needs of customers. We usually accidently decide develope-plan at lunchtime during eating lunch. and I decide what we will code functions through my own needsā¦ yeah fortunatelyā¦our company still aliveā¦ but our growth is stopped by appearance of some competitors recently.
My career in computers actually began as a software instructor, teaching all-day classes for paying customers. At the time, WordPerfect 5.1 was one of the biggest classes. I quickly learned the drill: speed through most of the topics before lunch, and then spend as much of the day as possible on tabs. Tabs were a concept that most students had enormous difficulty comprehending. Iām firmly convinced most of them left the class and went right back to aligning their text with the spacebar, just like they used to do on their typewriter. (Most electric typewriters at the time had tab stops too, but they usually didnāt use those either.)
Iāve started reading Almost Perfect (after seeing your tweet about it), and am thus far most reminded of John Walkerās AutoCAD story:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/
I only have good memories of using WordPerfect, and hated the inevitable transition to Word for Windowsā¦ at the time, I actually preferred the non-WYSIWYG interface and clearer view of the text vs. Wordās black-on-white low-res renderingā¦ this was before LCD monitors and ClearType and probably before TrueType and font rasterization hinting.
Luckily I code for a living in Visual Studio with fixed 6x13 font (eg. http://www.twoevils.org/html/files.html)ā¦ driving Word all day every day would drive me crazy.
WP sadly never adapted to the Windows world, which was a common mistake for very successful DOS product companies back then (such as Harvard Graphics).
WP should have kept the DOS version and made an equally desirable Windows version, one that would have handled both WP and MS Word files.
I always thought WordPerfect missed a couple of golden opportunities:
- Not getting the UX in itās transition to Windows
- Leveraging its Markup Engine for the web
Can you imagine how much easier it would have been if we had Reveal Code?
Did they actually connect the logical Company was run by programmers with the obvious conclusion Made bad assumptions (CLI), had bad goals (Parity) and Failed?
Iām a long-time programmer, but Iāll be the first to admit that most programmers shouldnāt be allowed near the product definition part of the businessā¦
I love Linux, but ALL the problems I have (or have ever heard of) with Linux derive directly from the fact that most features/requirements are defined by programmers.
Thanks a lot for this find, Jeff. Thatās why I read your blog - in between makes me puke ramblings you always manage to dig out real gems. 
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 giftsā¦ calling home to keep a romance alive ā¦ were all inappropriate when done on company time.
Yes, you would certainly not want to allow your employees to think that they were human. Might give them self-respect. Might allow them to come up with new ideas by forming friendships outside their own team. Then we wonāt control them! While on company time, we own you!
When I had to left my WP because it was too old, I wanted the reveal codes feature to be present in the new program; so now I use LaTeX.
I just hate coding. Itās a nightmare for me and i donāt like it at all.
i donāt know how you people manage to do itā¦ Isnt it boring to learn programming guys?
I was never a WordPerfect user so Iām no cheerleader; I liked Word on DOS mostly because the key bindings were more mnemonic ā Ctrl+B for bold instead of Shift-Alt-F7 (whatever. I donāt know the WP keybindings)
But I came to understand the power of WP later. WP could do things Word STILL canāt do (good kerning), and, like several people have mentioned, you donāt waste your time formatting while you type. Get the text right first then pretty it up later.
This defeat of WordPerfet by Word was, as is so common, a triumph of style over substance; Word was prettier. I admit though, for casual users who like to mouse around and donāt really care about pure productivity, Word is easier to fiddle with and make a nice little memo.
Lately I have to contend with people that attach a Word document to a wiki (we use Confluence at work) rather than just write in the wiki itself. Itās worse than browsing the web and suddenly hitting a PDF file that didnāt warn me itās a PDF.
+1 for explicit formatting codes. I would love to be able to create documents to the prettiness standards set by Word using HTML or similar. I spend too much time fixing exam papers my girlfriend prepares in MSWord and mangles; and so often, Word gives you that it workedā¦but I donāt know how experience because its formatting logic is both implicit (no reveal codes, no equivalent of a print statement) and dynamic (the rules change in order to be more convenient, which is incredibly inconvenient).
As a Python user, Iām conditioned to believe explicit is better than implicit and to like dynamic typing. I suspect, however, that it would be very hard to work in a dynamic language without explicitness. And a lot of MS products (and clones) effectively do just that; the status of things changes depending on the context, but you canāt have it cough the string literal to stdout and see what is actually happening.
This is because of MSās notion of user friendliness, which is based on a false premise - namely that computers are horrible, mysterious, capricious things that users will never understand and should not try to understand. Therefore, everything possible must be hidden behind layers of eye candy and infantilising language, and the user experience must be optimised on the assumption that nobody learns or tries to learn and therefore they must be treated like children. Therefore all the shifting rules and the fucking inconvenience of seeing any useful diagnostic information.
The premise is false because, of course, vast hordes of users have learnt that computers are horrible, mysterious, capricious things that they can never and should never try to understand from using Microsoft applications.
@Stephen P.: I donāt like writing on wiki itself when I want certain structure and layout. Wikis are too free form in my opinion, unless controlled, of course.
-1 for the following:
- user hits some random F key by mistake
- WordPerfect says do you want to save your doc?
- user says no, intending to get back to editing
- WordPerfect exits and discards all the userās work.
Too much of the time it acted like a conceited, passive-agressive spouse, too sure of itself and, in communication, always leaving out bits of important context.
I used several of early word processing programs, including WordStar (and later on the DOS version of MS Word which was very different from current version). Seldom I have used WordPerfect, even Windows version which now comes pre-installed on several of my computers.
My favorite which I used in college was AppleWriter, character-based program on Apple //e computer with powerful (for time) macro language called WPL (word processing language, of course). Clipboard had cumulative input/output buffer through Apple keys.
Like other early full-featured WP programs, it supported embedded commands with which you could do quite powerful things.
I always had feeling that AppleWriter was designed by programmers. It was quite logical and could do anything you imagine.
Like rest of the masses, I mainly now use Word quite alot. I like VBA, but current Word is clunky. Ribbon interface is horrible. To have a lot of capability does not mean clunky, overwhelming user interface is needed.
Oh yes ā perhaps strangest of word processors I have encountered was old Borland Sprint program, which like many Borland products was way ahead of its time and amazingly engineered. As I recall, it was like a Chameleon. It had selectable user interface, so you could choose to make it follow key commands and menus of other programs, as well as of course other languages and character sets.
Sprint also came with compiled macro language, which ran macros at blazing speed! As with other Borland products even today, this program I think was more popular in Europe than in USA.
Like WordPerfect, I think this program must have been imagined mostly by programmers.