Item — HN Reader

>I think WP was just too late to the party honestly

Nothing with the power of WordPerfect.

Hundreds of word processors were developed for DOS. Hundreds. Word, WordStar, and MultiMate, all developed by very large companies, were only the best known.

WordPerfect beat them all.

Feel free to claim that the ST or Amiga word processor developed by two guys somewhere in the UK has more features c. 1989.

3 comments

My favourite was Protext (Arnor) which was an old school mostly keyboard-centric word processor, rather than anything like DTP. Crazy powerful. It was originally Amstrad CPC, but later released on Atari ST, MS-DOS, Amiga, Archimedes and even more bespoke hardware like the Amstrad NC.

Did you know Protext is freeware now?

https://www.aptanet.org/protext/

I do a bootable DOS system on a live USB key and it includes Protext. :-)

https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos

> WordPerfect beat them all.

It was certainly popular, but I hated all the function keys (I still hate function keys) and my favourite was WordStar (not for Windows), for both word processing and as a programming editor, up until I switched to Word and Windows vi clones.

I remember the CP/M version of WordStar gave you a patching tool that allowed you to insert screen and keyboard handlers in machine code, for your specific hardware (to speed things up), into the WS code. I can still remember how clever I thought I was when I got this to work!

It's not that, it's that when WP did arrive on the ST it was a zero effort bad offering, two years late.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv2n6/wordperfect.php

Yes, the first ST version in 1987 had bugs. But WordPerfect fixed bugs for the next four years, and by 1988 was in good shape <https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n1/wordperfectst.html> despite, as I said, the huge problem with piracy (See, for example, the author of the 1987 review you cited writing at <https://archive.org/details/ST_Log_Magazine_Issue_21/page/n8...>. If the ST version were so useless why would he have bothered to appeal to the community?). As I said, the odds of a random no-name ST or Amiga word processor coming anywhere close to WordPerfect's power c. 1989 are zero.

Piracy always exists. The question is to what degree. On the PC the bulk of the market is business customers, where piracy is relatively minor compared to legitimate sales, and corporate customers have a lot of power when they complain to vendors; this is why copy protection more or less disappeared for PC business software after the mid-1980s, with Lotus being probably the last to comply by getting rid of the universally detested key-disk system. On the ST and Amiga the business market more or less didn't exist (no, musicians on ST, or small-town TV stations using Video Toaster for Amiga, aren't meaningful in number or percentage by comparison), so potential sales are limited by a) the far smaller size of the overall market and b) the far smaller percentage of customers within said smaller market paying for the product.