WordPerfect: The Word Processor Microsoft Beat but Never Killed

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In 1979, Brigham Young University graduate student Bruce Bastian and computer science professor Alan Ashton wrote a word processor for a Data General minicomputer owned by the city of Orem, Utah, and kept the rights. Their company, Satellite Software International, moved the program to the IBM PC in 1982, and because no C compiler existed for the machine, they wrote it entirely in x86 assembly language. That forced choice made WordPerfect faster than WordStar and, by 1990, the owner of 60 percent of the word processing market.

This episode follows the rise, the collapse, and the odd afterlife. WordPerfect won devotion with Reveal Codes, function key commands, safe macros, and free phone support, then stumbled badly when the world moved to Windows. A sale to Novell and a fire sale to Corel followed. Yet the software endures in law offices and government agencies, where exact formatting and decades of backward compatibility still matter more than fashion.

• The founders each held 49.9 percent of the company and gave office manager Pete Peterson 0.2 percent to act as tiebreaker.
• Reveal Codes split the screen to show every formatting tag in the text stream, much like HTML, so a stray bold code could be found and deleted instead of guessed at.
• WordPerfect macros lived outside the document, so files could not carry the macro viruses that later plagued Word. Support callers were entertained by hold jockeys while they waited.
• The first Windows version in 1991 was unstable and had to be installed from DOS, and Alt F4, a text blocking command in WordPerfect, closed the program in Windows. The company claimed Microsoft withheld API specifications.
• Novell paid $1.4 billion in 1994 and sold to Corel for $186 million in 1996. Corel closed the Orem offices in 1998 and moved development to Ottawa.