Chasing bugs in the electronic village (1992)

It's strange to think of the alternate reality where "WordPerfect for Windows" was as much as a hit as the original WordPerfect.

It really helped Microsoft that WordPerfect for Windows was a slow mess of a product.

It literally couldn't keep up with basic typing on the 386 we had. Input wasn't just laggy, it was utterly unusable even in a fresh empty file.

Trying it out on a friend's 486 it ran a bit better, but it was still felt like a confused product. Being comfortable in WP meant being comfortable with the keyboard interface and macros and it didn't translate well to windows at all.

A few years later, by the time Office 95 came out, WordPerfect felt like a completely dead product.

That was an amazing read, it left me wanting to read more. What happened next, how long did it take them to solve that mysterious font issue mentioned several times? Are there other articles about similar time periods?

>Word for Windows (a.k.a. Winword or WfW) would be Wysiwyg

>It would have a macro language — a way to spend hours writing mini-programs to streamline all those little chores that can suck up milliseconds of a writer’s time.

A fun throwback and a reminder of how far we've come