Nows and Forevers

Ode to WordPerfect

I was walking through Staples the other day when I glanced a software rack and saw a blast from the past: WordPerfect.

For computer users of a certain age — and you gotta be in your 50s, at least — WordPerfect rings a bell. I have to say that I had no idea WordPerfect was still going. I long ago left WordPerfect behind, but it was for years in the ’80s and into the early ’90s my word processor of choice.

I wrote a lot of college papers, and a fair amount of creative writing and short stories, on WordPerfect. Seeing the name again after all these years made me nostalgic.

Back in the mid-1980s I didn’t know much about computers. I was 16 or so, and had been around them at school a bit (my high school had an Apple II) and a lot more around my father’s house. He worked on mainframe computers in the ’70s and early ’80s and brought home his first portable computer, a Kaypro, in the early ’80s. And he bought a Commodore 64 in 1983, and I spent a whole summer happily typing away on short stories and playing Flight Simulator.

He later upgraded to an IBM PC clone and I first encountered WordPerfect and another word processor, WordStar on his computer when I stayed over. He was a professional writer and editor, so he kept up with computers and wanted one at home. Dad wasn’t much for computer games, so when I played with his computer, all I had were WordPerfect, WordPress and the occasional Lexis-Nexis research portal. (That was too expensive for me to use, though.)

When Dad upgraded to a better, faster model, I got the PC, for my senior year of high school. WordPerfect and WordStar came along with it.

Even today, nearly 40 years later, I can remember what the PC looked like on the desk next to my bed. It had an amber monitor, which sat on the long, flat, chrome computer case. Inside the case were two black disk drives, which took 5 1/4 inch discs, which in those days before cheap hard drives was the way to run a computer. One floppy disk held the computer program you wanted to run. The other was what wrote your words and data to disk. It was portable, noisy and oh-so-precious. If you bent the disk, or spilled something, or left it in the heat, your data was done for.

This was all in the DOS era, where you had to learn arcane codes to get anything to work on the c> line. It’s a little like terminal mode now on my Mac or on the PC, although you really didn’t have a choice. Just to open the program required to know the right prompt. I think it’s funny that I learned DOS pretty well and also Basic, the computer language. Both of those skills are useless now, and have been ever since the Mac and then Windows took over the world.

WordPerfect. In those days without the mouse, you had to know your way around a keyboard. That wasn’t too hard if all you wanted to do was write, although you had to pay attention to where you were saving your file and if you were at all. WordPerfect, and WordStar, were phenomenally complicated programs for their time. WordPerfect had a lot more customization available, thinks like advanced formatting and something that became macros, those little keystrokes that you could use to save some typing.

But being a teen-ager, all I wanted to do was write.

I had been typing papers and short stories for a long time, having inherited my dad’s college Smith Corona and then getting an electric typewriter for my 16th birthday. I wrote some on my dad’s Commodore 64 and then more on the PCs he got, but it wasn’t until I inherited one and could turn it on whenever I wanted that I really fell in love with writing on the computer.

And I think “fell in love” is a good way to describe it. I liked the idea of seeing my words on the screen. Even if the words and characters were all the same — there was no such thing as “what you see is what you get” — it was fascinating building my own paragraphs and pages, one after the other. I could move them around! I could write several beginnings, or middles, or ends. No eraser or correction type needed.

It was, and I still believe it today, kinda magical.

I wrote a lot in WordPerfect, not just everything for senior year of high school and then throughout college, but also short stories and attempts to write a novel and a play. I was then, and still continue, to be an all-of-the-above writer: I wrote my journal out by hand. I didn’t start writing my journal on the computer until I got out of college, which was by then on a Windows machine.

By the time the summer of 1990 rolled around, I had heard of this bright shiny object called Windows, and my next computer, a new Zeos, came with Windows 3.1 and, significantly, a full-color text editing application. I didn’t immediately fall in with Microsoft Word, either for work or for personal writing. Instead, I backed into it, using Microsoft Works and then, begrudgingly, picking up Word on sale and then, as a bundle with Microsoft Excel and, later Microsoft Access.

The bottom line is though that I left WordPerfect behind.

So did a lot of other people. Novell, which developed WordPerfect, sold it off in 1996 to Corel, which put out new versions and then began to bundle it with other Microsoft Office alternatives. Until Google came around and overturned the applecart, it apparently was a strong competitor.

I’ve gone past Word, gone past WordPerfect, WordStar, all the rest. I write a lot still, both for work and in my personal life. I use a variety of tools. I love their convenience, but I sometimes worry that the writing can get distracted by bells and whistles. That’s why I try hard to use only simple programs and apps for writing.

Just like the old days.