Keep in mind that many people were basically doing low-end DTP of technical documents in WordPerfect rather than learn Latex or splash out for something like FrameMaker, making it invaluable if you were creating document templates, or more complicated reports that spanned several separate documents. Happy times, or at least as happy as you can get when dealing with something like a word processor.īack to Reveal Codes though, and sure, you could mess up the document with mis-matched or mis-aligned tags (and what word processor doesn't let you get into that state?), but I actually found them to be incredibly useful for understanding exactly what was going on with more elaborate formatting. IIRC, the DOS version was still written almost entirely in assembly at that point, although 5.1 was probably the release most people would say was WordPerfect's pinnacle.
To digress briefly, I started with v4.2 as well, using another of its strengths - cross platform support I was using it on DOS and at least three UNIX flavours concurrently. There were many more of those than trained secretaries, so Word won out. Word was much more friendly to the occasional user and the "hunt-n-peck" keyboard user. It was not the easiest piece of software to learn, but if you knew how to correctly type, you could be amazingly productive with it. (In their typing classes, secretaries were trained to keep all ten fingers on the keyboard.) WP had to be very fast (it ran on the 8086, if I'm remembering correctly) in order to keep up with their rapid input - you didn't want it to drop any characters- so it was written in assembly. The secretaries using WP could do everything in it using Alt and Ctrl key combinations that they memorized - there was no need to stop and take yout hand off the keyboard to move a mouse around.
Back then, colleges actually offered degrees in "Secretarial Science" - women took classes where they learned to type fast and accurately, how to file, how to accurate notes using "shorthand", etc. Wordperfect 5.1 (and earlier) were designed to be used by secretaries who had been trained to be amazingly fast touch typists.
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