RIP: WordPerfect co-founder Bruce Bastian dies at 76 Tech entrepreneur Bruce Wayne Bastian, co-founder of WordPerfect, died last month at the age of 76 at his home in Palmdale, California. The cause, according to the B. W. Bastian Foundation, was "complications associated with pulmonary fibrosis." Bastian helped create the word processing application that became WordPerfect …
I worked with WordPerfect a lot in the '80s and through into the early '90s, it was a good product on MS-DOS, but the transition to Windows was rather fumbled.
I always thought that the name was a stroke of genius, linking the product to the generic WP so that when people considered a Word Processor, they automatically first thought WordPerfect. Of course, it being a decent product didn't hurt any.
I remember the dying days of the typing pool, when skilled WordPerfect people were commanding £15-20/hour, which back in those days meant a week of solid work could buy you half a semi-detached house in Woking.
GJC
Yes, indeed. I was supporting a WP and spreadsheet file translation package at the time, which jacked into email so you could email attachments to colleagues and they would be automatically translated from your WP format to their WP format on the fly. As I recall, it supported 54 different WP file formats, and about a dozen spreadsheet ones.
A few years later when Windows had got itself established, MS Office basically had the market to itself, excepting a few specialist things for, say, medical or legal markets.
GJC
As I recall, quite a few competitors "fumbled" the transition to Windoze. M$ were very fortunate during that time . . .
Fortune had fuck-all to do with it. What had more to do with it was a cunning misdirection by BillG of the WP developers to develop for OS/2 (which he also had a hand in), and of course the Hidden Windows APIs (ref: Undocumented Windows: A Programmer’s Guide to Reserved Windows API Functions by Andrew Schulman, David Maxey, and Matt Pietrek).
Hanlon's anti-razor: Never attribute to incompetence that which is accurately explained by malice.
> quite a few competitors "fumbled" the transition to Windoze. M$ were very fortunate during that time . .
Did not help when a new laptop came bundled with Word ....on 34 floppy discs in a slightly non-standard format which would not copy and it always failed to install on disc 34....
Firstly, Mr Bastian sold at the perfect time. He may have had the business sense to see how Microsoft would seek to crush WP in it's quest for dominance.
Secondly, I have memories observing my mother using WP on DOS to type various legal documents, and I used it for quite a few school assignments myself. I shifted to WordPad once we were on Windows and used that for years. I never used MS Word until after college when it was made available for the Home Use Program for $10.
I have used WordPerfect since it first appeared, I'm still using WordPerfect Office now to create and update all the corporate manuals. It's always been creating highly accurate and beautiful documents and is so reliable to use. I have to use Microsoft Word versions occasionally too but they keep get getting updated to work much worse. WordPerfect has always been Perfect and easy to use!
I think that was perhaps the key issue: WordPerfect was an excellent tool for secretaries/typists - you could fly through screeds of typing without lifting your hands from the keyboard.
I'm not sure it was the advent of windows (as a paradigm rather than as a brand) that did for the role of typist or the demise of the typist that led to the development of tools that could accommodate the slow, fat fingers of entry-level managers, but the consequence was that WP's early lead in the text market was of very little help when the requirements changed utterly.
What killed the typist roles was when computers became cheap enough for one per desk people realised that the typing skills were rather irrelevant when someone was writing a memo, letter etc. - The slowest part was thinking what to write, which meant it took about the same time to produce a handwritten draft to send to typing pool as it did to produce the final document and that'd could go out immediately, not wait for typing pool to do it, send it back to be checked and sent out
And they also baked some sneaky replacements for core OS functionality into their own application programs.
The last version of Office for Windows pre-95 could be installed on Win95; but used its own replacement file requester designed to look very like the OS one. As a consequence of this, it could only support 8.3 filenames, because the file requester was not using the proper OS call to check the validity of filenames supplied by the user.
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The thing which made high user-speed in DOS WordPerfect possible, the use of function key-combos to invoke WP commands, is no longer possible on laptops.
PC laptop keyboard designers, aping the KB design fashionistas at Apple, have made function keys tiny, and/or accessible only via a "Fn" key, or removed them entirely from the keyboard, as in some modern Dell laptops.
"Microsoft's strategy of bundling its Word application with other office software and selling them as a suite of applications."
FWIW, the function key usage was what put me off WordPerfect and kept me using WordStar. WordStars use of control key sequences where the most common ones were sort of mnemonics for the function was a lot easier to learn than numbered function keys. Maybe it's just how some peoples brain works <shrug>. Also, WordStar had an earlier history coming from CP/M where computers and dumb terminals had very different keyboards, some with and some without function keys, and those that did have them might have anthing from 3 or 4 up to 20+, and maybe not even have cursor keys, so using CTRL-key function was pretty much the only option if you wanted a similar experience on vastly different systems. WP had some nice features compared to WS, especially in later versions, but not enough in my case to justify learning a whole new muscle memory to operate it efficiently :-)
I had a (very) successful career in IT all thanks to WordPerfect. As an office junior for a company of 10,000 users I wrote some automation process (macros?) on WP and shared them amongst other staff. Six months later various people came into the office looking for me, and asking "show me what you did". They went away with a "hmmmmm" . A week later the CEO said "we are creating a PC dept and we need someone who knows about computers". (and yes they did ask me to create their web page, it had music and a flashing banner, it was a site to behold.)
"WordPerfect lost significant market share during the first half of the 1990s due to Microsoft's strategy of bundling its Word application with other office software and selling them as a suite of applications."
Also the fact that Microsoft did not publish key api's that allowed Microsoft own applications to run considerable faster than their competitors...
WP for DOS was excellent. We were a big user at the site. Then windows came out and we were transferred to WP for windows. It ran like a 3 legged dog with its naggers caught in a vice
Down the office someone had a pirated copy of MS word. It ran far faster, didn't crash etc. It soon became the default WP in the office. The only benefit WP had was backwards compatibility with existing documents, but that was not enough to stop the transfer
The opinion at the time was that WP had dropped the ball. It later came out the MS had deliberately crippled competing products by not releasing all the API's
The funny thing was, when windows 3 came out, there was a big advertising campaign which had various CEO's of DOS applications saying how they would support windows. I often wondered if they had known that MS would aggressively eat their lunch they would of been so keen to support it.
That's an interesting thought. If the word processor and spreadsheet vendors had said Windows wasn't fast enough, they'd stick to DOS would Windows have caught on, Microsoft released the APIs or would they still have won the day with Windows & Office? The latter might not have been a foregone conclusion.
> It ran like a 3 legged dog with its naggers caught in a vice
Back in 1993 or 1994, I discovered that my university was offering WordPerfect for Windows and Quattro Pro for Windows to students for £80—which was still a lot of money in 1993, but a hell of a lot cheaper than full retail price. So I paid my money, and took the software boxes (Boxes! With disks & manuals!) back to my digs.
Quattro Pro wasn't too bad at all (image). But as for the main attraction, WordPerfect 5.2.... oh dear. It was clunky, slow, and bloody ugly (image). My heart sank! :-(
P.S. The article mentions Pete Peterson's book "Almost Perfect", about his time as CEO at the company. It's a good read. If anyone's interested, Pete has made it available for free to either read on his site or to download as a PDF: https://wepeterson.com/almostperfect/
I remember in the 1990s going down to a Novell office to see their take on a SGML based word processor. Their internal markup approach lent itself very well to morphing into generalised markup (I'd always used WP with reveal codes on up to that point) and when pointed at the right DTD and stylesheet it gave you WYSIWIG SGML.
It never saw the light of day, or if it did then it wasn't properly promoted. The world wasn't interested in proper document management when they could just produce great big hairballs of MS-Word.
My mum trained as a legal secretary and worked from 1958 to 2005 when she died from stroke after an accident. From 1992 until 2005 she worked at home for a probate solicitor, she'd work typing from tapes the solicitor dictated.
My mum swore by WordPerfect5 for DOS, she absolutely hated MS Word, she hated WP for Windows and she said the macro system in WP for DOS was absolutely amazing, she said the macro system alone saved her about 30% of her time so she could get the wills and probates done much faster. She kept dozens of templated documents in WP format which she'd memorize the content in her head. My dad once tried to reorganise my mum's WP templates folders and it almost ended in divorce. She couldn't find anything and a huge row errupted between them that lasted about a week and my dad learned his lesson to leave my mum's PC alone!
that he was a strong advocate of equal rights and, like me, a member of the LGBT 'community'.
I well remember using WordPerfect on PC's in the 1990s. It coped really well, provided teh documents were less than about 150 pages, but then Bill Gates bundled MS Word in for free and WP was still paid for.
Good obituary, great that his non-IT legacy lives on.
MS Word has always been free, if you know the right people .....
That's why there isn't a market for a £50 office suite. Why would anyone want to save £450 against a £500 office suite, when they could save £500 against the £500 office suite?
Anyone trying to sell a £50 office suite will go out of business, entirely due to piracy, even although no-one need ever make a single unauthorised copy of their product.
I read somewhere, possibly in the book "Accidental Empires," that MS condoned piracy in the early days on the grounds that it was better for them in the long run if people used pirated copies rather than a competitors product. Certainly they did manage dto bring about a situation where Office file formats became the de facto standard.
Yes, exactly. It's hard to catch people using pirate copies of Microsoft Office at home; and even if you did manage it, they probably would just buy something cheaper instead, so why not just ..... let them get away with it? At least they've chosen to rip your products off, and so are going to learn how to use them on their own time. Bide your time, and those users will be more likely to ask for your products in the workplace (where it's much easier to enforce against piracy).
This situation -- where people have managed to discover for themselves, despite a lack of documentation, how just enough of the features work to put something together that looks a bit a document -- is also why you see so many documents laid out for a paper size that is only used in one country in the world, using ad hoc font changes instead of styles, spaces for positioning, and spreadsheets with columns of figures that have been added up with an idiot-calculator. (This last point will almost certainly have caused something to go badly wrong, when someone else edited a figure in the column, expecting the total to have been created properly using a formula, and the total was now incorrect.)
I worked in a computer store mid 80's to mid 90's when Wordperfect sold for about $500 CAD, but for that price you got free support.
We'd get people coming in that had pirated copies of WP asking us how to do "stuff". I'd tell them to buy a legit copy and call WP's free spport line. They usually got mad and went somewhere else.
What actually killed WP or rather its market share momentum was the failed IPO. Although MS's very illegal business tactics helped it along.
WP was planning a big IPO. They had seen just how successful some of the other Mormon Tech Mafia IPO's had been. Not just Novell but a bunch of other SLC area tech companies had hit serious pay dirt. The founders were unwilling to let go of control for the longest time but eventually (two if I remember correctly) wanted to cash out.
So in came the bankers and the accountants to prepare everything for the IPO. Which included restating the company financials so they were consistent with SEC regulations and standards. Now the guy who was the CFO at the time was one of the original employees. A small company book-keeper basically. A nice guy by all accounts. Who never really updated WP's financial record keeping / financial control etc with what the company had become. Not exactly keeping invoices in shoe-boxes. But closes enough. One big cash book / journal for all intents and purposes. So when the accountants brought in by the IPO underwriters restated WP annual accounts for the previous few financial years so they conformed to something close to GAAP the annual of profit of around $70M turned out to be a loss of closer to $30M or so.
And thats when the quickly organized over a very frantic weekend bail out cum acquisition by Novell was organized. To stop WP collapsing in a very embarrassing and very public financial scandal. What Corel paid for WP soon after was close to what the company was actually worth. With the restated accounts.
After that it was all downhill for WP as the installed base slowly faded away and few new customers were added.
I still have the 1994 "Merger Day" T-shirt - Novell, WordPerfect, Quattro Pro
When you entered the valley you were in a different world. Closed, top-down, static. The surrounding mountains kept any breaths of fresh air from reaching those companies. Worked for two companies based there, and never could get reality to intrude upon their 'visions'.
Knew a guy who went to work for a company in Ogden. Probably the best deal maker I've ever met. He epitomized Getting To Yes. If he put a deal together it was a guaranteed Win / Win for everyone.
He tried his magic in the new company and nothing happened. Deal after deal went stale. Always on the Utah side. And he could never get a straight answer as to why. In the end he realized that as a good Lutheran boy from the Midwest he would never ever be "one of us" in Utah. Nothing overt. In fact the Mormons are usually pretty much the nicest most straight forward people you could possible meet and that was his experience too. But the Latter Day Saints, especially the Elders, live in a parallel universe that only intersects the outside world in very well defined and tightly controlled ways. Always on their terms. Once he realized that he cut his losses and returned to the PNW to do what he did best. Making deals where everyone came out ahead.
The first computer I owned was an Apple ][ clone that included all the professional extras like an 80-column card and a Z-80 Softcard to run CP/M.
Word processing was an obvious bonus, especially since my handwriting was terrible and I had learned to touch type in high school.
WordStar was great mostly, because it immediately told you how to get around after launching, giving you a legend of the most important navigation keys and the option to hide/restore the help menu at any time to not waste precious 80x24 screen real-estate.
Word and Multiplan likewise gave you immediate hints, although they tended to waste the lower lines for menu and those wouldn't go away. But it was logical, dense and Word had inheritance for formatting, which was crucial for consistent documents. Multiplan was also always way more logical than VisiCalc with it relative and symbolic references in the formula language and I never felt any temptation to use 1-2-3.
WordPerfect left you with an empty screen after launching. In fact just trying to get out of it without resetting the computer turned out to be difficult: none of the known keystrokes worked (this was long before SAA and there was only one function key labelled "CTL").
Perhaps RTFM would have made all the difference but with WordStar there was simply no incentive to change and then the Turbo Pascal built-in editor with WordStar compatible commands was the main tool for editing code anyway, and not even just for Pascal.
Function keys only ever arrived with the IBM-PC, none of the early computers had them. But to get to them, you'd have to leave your home keys and look at the keyboard to find them, a complete break in the midst of writing, that WordStar controls didn't suffer, as long as the Control-key was in its proper place. And then they even started to move the function keys from the left to the top, where chances of hitting them blind were even worse! But that's another story...
Combing back to WordPerfect: I've always felt that a product that left me near helpless right after starting, should never be called WordPerfect: nothing perfect about being left in the dark!
I guess that always felt a bit arrogant so I felt little inclination to ever change my mind.
But I know that some of my favorite writers just loved it, so I guess it did a lot of good for me eventually.
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