Parallel Shift

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

WordPerfect was originally developed under contract at Brigham Young University for use on a Data General minicomputer in the late 1970s. The authors retained the rights to the program, forming the Utah-based Satellite Software International (SSI) in 1979 to sell it; the program first came to market under the name SSI*WP in March 1980. It was then ported to the MS-DOS operating system in 1982, by which time the name WordPerfect was in use, and several greatly updated versions quickly followed. The application's feature list was considerably more advanced than its main competition, WordStar. Satellite Software International changed its name to WordPerfect Corporation in 1985. WordPerfect gained praise for its 'look of sparseness' and clean display. It rapidly displaced most other systems, especially after the 4.2 release in 1986, and it became the standard in the DOS market by version 5.1 in 1989. Its early popularity was based partly on its superior functionality, availability for a wide variety of computers and operating systems, and also partly because of extensive, no-cost support (even eventually offering 'hold jockeys' who entertained users while waiting on the phone).

In Their Own Story

In 1979, Brigham Young University graduate student Bruce Bastian and computer science professor Alan Ashton created word processing software for a Data General minicomputer system owned by the city of Orem, Utah. Bastian and Ashton retained ownership of the software that they created, and founded Satellite Software International, Inc. (SSI) in 1980 to market the program to other Data General users. WordPerfect 1.0 represented a significant departure from the previous Wang standard for word processing. By the end of the year SSI had 16 employees including W. E. 'Pete' Peterson, hired as bookkeeper and office manager. Bastian worked as program manager while Ashton taught at BYU in the morning and worked on the software with his best students in the afternoon. Bastian and Ashton each owned 49.9% of the company, and Peterson—who became executive vice president, and actively managed the company—received 0.2% to break ties. The first version of WordPerfect for the IBM PC was released the day after Thanksgiving in 1982. It was sold as WordPerfect 2.20, continuing the version numbering from the Data General program. SSI's sales that year were $1 million. Over the next several months, three more minor releases arrived, mainly to correct bugs. The developers had hoped to program WordPerfect in C, but at this early stage, there were no C compilers available for the IBM PC, and they had to program it in x86 assembly language. All versions of WordPerfect up to 5.0 were written in x86, and C was only adopted with WP 5.1, when it became necessary to convert it to non-IBM compatible computers. The use of straight assembly language and a high amount of direct screen access gave WordPerfect a significant performance advantage over WordStar, which used strictly DOS API functions for all screen and keyboard access, and was often very slow. In addition, WordStar, originally created for the CP/M operating system, in which subdirectories are not supported, was slow to support sub-directories in MS-DOS. In 1983, WordPerfect 3.0 was released for DOS. This was updated to support DOS 2.x, sub-directories, and hard disks. It also expanded printer support, where WordPerfect 2.x only supports Epson and Diablo printers that were hard-coded into the main program. Adding support for additional printers this way was impractical, so the company introduced printer drivers, a file containing a list of control codes for each model of printer. Version 3.0 has support for 50 different printers, and this was expanded to 100 within a year. WordPerfect also supplied an editor utility that allows users to make their own printer drivers, or to modify the included ones. A version of WordPerfect 3.0 became the Editor program of WordPerfect Office. WordPerfect 4.0 was released in 1984; by then WordPerfect was the third most-popular word processor, behind WordStar and MultiMate. WordPerfect 4.1 appeared in 1985, with versions for various non-PC compatibles such as Tandy 2000 and DEC Rainbow. WordPerfect 4.2, released in 1986, introduced automatic paragraph numbering, important to law offices, and automatic numbering and placement of footnotes and endnotes that were important both to law offices and academics. It became the first program to overtake the original market leader WordStar in a major application category on the DOS platform. By 1986 more than 300 large companies used what had become the best-selling word processor in the United States, with 60% of sales from word of mouth. SSI (renaming itself WordPerfect Corporation that year) was the fifth-largest independent software company, with $52 million in annual sales. Sales doubled to more than $100 million in 1987 for the 350 WordPerfect Corp. employees, including 100 in customer support. Ashton left BYU to serve as full-time president. That year Compute! magazine described WordPerfect as 'a standard in the MS-DOS world' and 'a powerhouse program that includes almost everything'. Competitor WordMARC cited its rival by name, advertising that 'WordPerfect Ain't'. In a negative review of DisplayWrite, John V. Lombardi noted that the IBM product was the same price as WordPerfect but without the latter's 'such superior support'. By this time the company occupied eight small locations around Orem; Peterson described WordPerfect's growth as a 'crisis', forcing it to take any new available office space while planning for a new corporate headquarters by the end of the year. Rapid growth continued, with $196 million in sales in 1988 and 1100 employees increasing to more than $500 million in 1990 and 4000 employees. By then WordPerfect Corporation was the third-largest PC software vendor, ahead of Ashton-Tate; WordPerfect and Microsoft Word were the two leading word processors, each competing with the other in frequently adding features and lowering prices, and with significantly more market shares than DisplayWrite 4 and MultiMate. In November 1989, WordPerfect Corporation released the program's most successful version, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, the first version to include pull-down menus to supplement the traditional function key combinations, support for tables, a spreadsheet-like feature, and full support for typesetting options, such as italic, redline, and strike-through. This version also included 'print preview', a graphical representation of the final printed output that became the foundation for WordPerfect 6.0's graphic screen editing. WordPerfect 5.1+ for DOS was introduced to allow older DOS-based PCs to utilize the new WordPerfect 6 file format. This version can read and write WordPerfect 6 files, included several third-party screen and printing applications (previously sold separately), and has several minor improvements. WordPerfect Corporation acquired Reference Software International, makers of Grammatik, a popular grammar checker for DOS, in January 1993 for $19 million. RSI's employees were absorbed into WordPerfect in Orem, and the functionality of Grammatik and Reference Set (a spell checker that RSI also sold) were eventually integrated into WordPerfect. WordPerfect continued selling Grammatik as a standalone product for several years. WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS, released in 1993, can switch between its traditional text-based mode and a graphical mode that shows the document as it would print out, known as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). WordPerfect 5 had introduced a print preview mode that displays the layout of the document on a page using generic fonts, but the view mode is uneditable. The editing still needed to be done in text mode. By WordPerfect 6.0 the company had grown 'to command more than 60 percent of the word processing software market'. In November 1993, WordPerfect acquired another Orem, UT based software company, SoftSolutions, to bolster one of its two core competencies - 'work-group computing'. According to Ken Duncan, president of SoftSolutions, the strategy was to broadly distribute SoftSolutions' 'technical capabilities' in document management via WordPerfect's large 'installed base' of users.

Reader's Guide

The distinguishing features of WordPerfect include extensive use of function keys. Its dominant position ended approximately two to three years after the first release for Microsoft Windows; the company reported Microsoft did not initially share its Windows Application Programming Interface (API) specifications, causing the WordPerfect for Windows application to be slow. After WordPerfect received the Windows APIs, there was a long delay in reprogramming before introducing an improved version. Microsoft Word had been introduced at the same time as its first attempt, and while WordPerfect initially enjoyed the highest market share of word processors for Windows, in a matter of years, Word took over the market because it was faster, employed aggressive corporate sales contracts, and was promoted by aggressive bundling deals that ultimately produced Microsoft Office. WordPerfect Corporation was sold to Novell in 1994, which then sold the product to Corel in 1996. WordPerfect was no longer a popular standard by the late '90s. Corel has made regular releases to the product since then, often in the form of office suites under the WordPerfect name that include the Quattro Pro spreadsheet, the Presentations slides formatter, and other applications. The common filename extension of WordPerfect document files is .wpd. Older versions of WordPerfect also used file extensions .wp, .wp7, .wp6, .wp5, .wp4, and originally, no extension at all.

Did You Know?

• WordPerfect was originally developed under contract at Brigham Young University for use on a Data General minicomputer in the late 1970s.
• The first version for the IBM PC was released the day after Thanksgiving in 1982, sold as WordPerfect 2.20.
• WordPerfect 4.2, released in 1986, became the first program to overtake the original market leader WordStar in a major application category on the DOS platform.
• By 1990, WordPerfect Corporation had grown to 4000 employees and more than $500 million in sales.
• WordPerfect Corporation was sold to Novell in 1994, which then sold the product to Corel in 1996.