the first WP software i used, back around 1985, was Lotus 123 on what we would now consider to be a very clunky desktop that was really just a portal to the mainframe. I've never been a fast typer, i still pretty much use one finger although at one time i did get to two hands and four fingers, anyhow, that set up was so slow that even i could type whole sentences but then have to wait for everything to catch up!

Over the years i've used all sorts of WP software, some a lot better than others, currently i'm using Libre, not my favourite but generally it works, this version is a lot better than the previous time i used it. In essence there was no problem with that first WP software but MS et al want to make money so they 'develop' new versions with new stuff that we didn't know we needed and usually don't want, make it incompatible with anything else and sell it to us again and so on, on repeat. Businesses mostly get little choice in the matter, home users though do have some discretion even if most new machines arrive loaded with MS software, vive la differance!

I remember when I took a look at Word Perfect and I found it a bit cumbersome. I was working for a small Office Equipment company. I was there when we offered our first computer for our customers. An AVL Eagle II computer. It was a turn-key CP/M machine. It didn't take too long to find out that serious customers didn't want a turn-key machine. We got a CP/M disk for the computer and I found I had to learn the ins and outs of an operating system.

Even then we found that the Eagle II was inadequate for our customers. We then went with a new company EXO computers. Long story short, most of our customers were nitch market and needed special software so I learned to write in dBase II. Word Perfect was useless for that because is saved files with a none printable page break that caused dBase routines to hang. So I started using Perfect Writer, which saved everything in plain text. It was not a WYSIWYG word processor. You had to be very involved in what it would look like when you printed it out. Which was fine, because producing routines in dBase was much the same kind of mind set.

We were slow in changing over to DOS based machines, but when we did I still produced nitch solutions for our customers, now in dBase III. Then when another employee and I went out on our own, I became a computer consultant. Word Perfect made a stab a following the move to 16 bit machines, but with all the WYSIWYG already there and established, they couldn't compete. I had one of the last DOS Word Perfect disks produced.

I used it and two other pieces of software to create EXE files from dBase IV routines that ran standalone. Up until Windows ditched DOS I was able to make a fair living writing nitch software with that cheat work around for never having learned a higher programing language

Somehow, I still miss Perfect Writer. As a tribute to that software, the folder on my hard drive that I save my Word files is called PW.