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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Yep. It was THE program. A bit like how Office was THE program in the late 90s and in the 2000s before Google Docs really started taking off.

The kind of thing people bought computers for. You didn’t need a computer. You needed Word Perfect.

I still remember the little card you could put above the function keys on your keyboard that showed you what alt-F7 or ctrl-F9 did. Each modifier was a different color.

First program I remember seeing people really use on a computer when I was a kid.

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As I understand it, WordPerfect held on in the legal professions after most others had switched to MS Office (Word). I guess there were a lot of good templates and many law firms had all their boilerplate documents in WP and didn't want to change.

Have you ever used LaTeX?

Word Perfect was like LaTeX and MS Word at the same time. You could edit text or you could edit the codes and there were no nasty surprises or any random reorganization of the document because you copy pasted something.

Also, by editing the codes you could dictate the precise way the document should look.

I think it was ahead of its time.

Sadly, WP 6.0 changed the macro language too much (they made everything an object and many features were lost) and it was not as successful as WP5.1, because you just don't make all the macros of your customers obsolete overnight.

The loss of `reveal codes` is still felt when Word does arbitrary craziness with documents!

Does (did) Word even have "codes" as such? I thought it was quite different from WP in that regard. Modern Word .docx is an XML format now anyway.

Part of the appeal of WordPerfect (and Reveal Codes) in the legal industry was the ability to create a document that look exactly what you needed it to look like. Appellate briefs, as I remember, had to be no more than a certain number of pages of text of a certain font and point size with specified margins and line spacing, and doing that in Word was doable but a nightmare.

Lotus 1-2-3 was THE program for PCs in the DOS era. WordPerfect was a close second, followed by dBase and then maybe Flight Simulator.

When magazines reported, or OEMs advertised, that a particular computer had "100% IBM compatibility", generally there wasn't like a formal benchmark for this. It basically meant that the PC versions of Lotus and Flight Simulator ran fine on the machine.

Right. It wasn’t the only or the biggest.

I was trying to get across it was one of the juggernauts of the day. A program normal people knew about if you knew the names of any computer programs.

Perhaps it was the most popular for home users, I don’t know. I was far too young in its heyday.

As productivity software went though it was BIG.

WordPerfect was the go-to in the legal profession. Among other advantages, its "Reveal Codes" feature was an enormous help in making sure documents were formatted correctly, which was essential in law, as courts often have specific formatting requirements for filed documents.

Microsoft Word not only lacked Reveal Codes, it mocked it in an Easter egg in Word for Windows 2.0. Tells you what you need to know about Word, basically.

I remember when I first heard the legal profession still used WP like 2 decades after its heyday. It was a real surprise.

But if you’re going to have a niche market, that’s a pretty good niche. They care about formatting a lot and have a lot of money to spend if it helps them enough.

A bit like how Office was THE program in the late 90s and in the 2000s before Google Docs really started taking off.

This is wishful thinking. Google Docs is only hovering around 10% market share.

Google Docs has a feature set more in line with Wordpad (the stripped down word processor that comes with Windows) than Office Word. I can't understand how anyone can use it for anything at all without running into its limitations, so I'm not surprised it's not all that popular outside of basic shared documents.

I would say Works, it’s much more than Wordpad.

The vast majority of documents people write for within Google Docs’ limitations. I wouldn’t use it for a book or maybe a dissertation. But it works great for a lot of day to day internal business documents.

That seems low to me, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’s not dominant. However it has an awful lot of mindshare.

The only keyboard thing similar to that I ever used was the full keyboard cover that came with the Flintstones PC game.

This is either it or very very close:

http://xahlee.info/kbd/wordperfect_shortcuts_strip.html

And for context, this link has a picture of it on top of a keyboard (cropped):

https://luciamonterorodriguez.com/atajos-de-teclado-y-raton-...

I remember Janes AH-64 Longbow also had a keyboard cover.

https://archive.org/details/janes-ah-64-d-longbow-95/keyboar...

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