> so while i never used WordPerfect, i would not be surprized if such a thing existed.
WordPerfect competed heavily with Microsoft Word back in the DOS days. I made money in high school with side jobs teaching people to use WordPefect for DOS, and making utilities to convert and process WordPerfect files for small businesses.
I wrote all of my high school papers on WordPerfect for the Amiga, which was basically just a straight port of the text-only DOS version.
> WordPerfect competed heavily with Microsoft Word back in the DOS days.
In my part of the world, on MSDOS, MS Word was not even in competition with WordPerfect.
It was only with the advent of Windows (more specifically, Win95) that MS Word started seeing non-fractional percentage of usage compared to WordPerfect 5.1
Yeah, i had heard that WordPerfect was by far the preferred or better software in those days, though i never used. (To clarify: i was too young to know better, and simply used what was available to me at the time...which was only MS Word.)
I think in the days of DOS, the main players were WordPerfect and WordStar. Probably more than Word or any part of MS Office, MS Works was a decent cheap option that I saw a lot of places.
> WordPerfect competed heavily with Microsoft Word back in the DOS days.
Ha! I'd say it was more accurate to say that MS Word tried to compete with WordPerfect.
It was only with the rise of Windows that Word became a contender, and WordPerfect was relegated to trying to compete.
> a straight port of the text-only DOS version.
Just out of interest: WP was a Data General app. The DOS version was a port, as was the Amiga version, SCO Xenix, classic MacOS, all the others. The native app was a DG minicomputer program.
Part of its competitiveness in the pre-GUI era was that WordPerfect was very portable and the company ported it to almost every OS going, complete with its massive suite of state-of-the-art printer drivers.
If you were not using a DG Nova minicomputer then you were running a port.
But as GUIs became standard, they almost all included printing subsystems, using soft fonts rendered by the same code that rendered stuff on screen. Printers' own built-in fonts became irrelevant: GUIs just dumped bitmaps to the printer.
So WordPerfect's best-in-the-industry printer drivers, which supported every printer in the world and could make it do backflips, became irrelevant.
WP was still used for typing practice back in uuhh... 1998/1999, I think they intentionally used that instead of their Windows counterparts to minimize distractability.
Good on you that you made money that way in high school!