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It was really the Macintosh and Windows WYSIWYG that killed WordStar, WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.

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Thank you 😊😊

You might do a history of the different Word versions, particularly the messy transition between Word 5.1a and Word 6.0 on Macs.

and now the python ecosystem competes with excel

I loved PFS Professional Write for the PC. (Prior to that I used a C64 word processor Word Writer by Timeworks.) Then I went to work for a company that used Word Perfect, followed up by another employer that used it. Did an OK job, but PFS allowed you to make lines and boxes, WordPerfect didn't. I really don't know how Microsoft took over the world with it's actually worse Word processor. I first was introduced to it because my Wife's employer used it, and I needed to install it on our PC (using DOS 3). I hated it, but she was required to use it. On the spreadsheet front, again using the C64, Time works did a good job with Swiftcalc. On my PC, I used AsEasyAs, shareware. It duplicated Lotus123, and was free.

Ami Pro was a fantastic word processor. It had great graphics facilities. Much more useful than Word.

Vibrating photo effects make this video unwatchable

They should bring Mxit back anyone can make apps these days bring Mxit back.

LaTex is the best💛

pfs:Write

I used GeoWrite on my Commodore 64 running the GEOS operating system to write many reports when I was in high school. Wordperfect was also way better than MS Word.

OpenOffice FTW!

I used Apple Writer on my Apple IIe along with Visi-Calc.

However

It appears you missed the largest reason that Word and Excel took over - Microsoft Cheated. Microsoft wrote the programming languages that were often used by compeditors like WordStar; and Word Perfect. Microsoft added Undocumented features into the languages they knew internally but they did not provide knowledge of to their compeditors. As a result when their products like Word / Excel were tested & compared the Microsoft products performed faster because they used the undocumented functions. Cheats; not innovators. What you think WP didn't make a Windows ver?

LOL the rise of privacy @ $495 in 1976 just made it clear to rip off this junk. Long live Mac Write.

My first word processor was Radio Shack's Scripsit, which ran on my TRS-80 Model I with 4K of RAM. It could fit 3 pages or so of text into memory, I remember doing a couple papers in high school on that thing. Eventually upgraded to using a pirated copy of Wordstar for my college papers, and then WordPerfect 5.1 after that, which was like a Cadillac to me. Reveal Codes forever! lol Today, it's LibreOffice for home and Office 365 for work.

You need a new mic.

Unbelievable how succesful of a grifting, lying, narcissistic, shameless egoamaniac this guy is. Media are equally complicit in creating a narrative that Elon Musk deserves anything more than being ostracized and forgotten in human history.

Old millennial/very young Gex X here, who played computer games on late DOS/Win 3.1 but, ultimately, had my first personal computer as a Win 95 machine. My first word processor was Microsoft Works (not Word), the program suite that everyone forgets ever existed. (And, it is due to Works that my late high school and early collegiate work are all lost due to incompatibility with Word.) Late college, I was stuck in my university's departmental war where one department (education) used Word for Macs, and the Social Sciences department demanded WordPerfect (Corel era) for Windows (95/98). I chose WordPerfect, and... again... that era of documents is now lost too (formatting issues on conversion). It wasn't only businesses, and thus employees, ... and the businesses who made the software, who ended up with issues due to the processor wars... but students too.

07:56: I remember the word processing wars very well, from my years at a major construction company and then even more years at JPL. When WordPerfect 5.1 came out in 1989, I waited eagerly for the WordPerfect tractor-trailer truck to pull in at the loading dock to disgorge hundreds (probably more than a thousand) shrink-wrapped copies of WordPerfect 5.1 for distribution to users around the Lab. Those were the "primitive" days when "analog" means were used to distribute software -- by truck and then by installing the software on packages of floppy disks (still used 5-and-a-quarter-inch floppies for PCs, then!), praying that you didn't have a bad floppy in your copy or that you hadn't damaged, say, the third or fourth disc in your prized set, thus thwarting your install. Then I, and several other minions on our team, had to go from computer to computer and install WordPerfect 5.1 on scores of PCs. Those were the analog-to-digital transition days! Of course, the Macintosh users sneered at the PC users, back then: "Where's your mouse on that PC?" Remember Novell servers vs MS Net fights? Remember Egghead Software stores? Remember "The Year of the Network" headlines that proclaimed for several years running that, finally, this was the year that all desktop computers would finally be corralled into local area networks? Remember the CP/M vs. DOS arguments? We still had Wang OIS word processing users hanging onto their terminals that were, by 1990, as primitive as muzzle loading rifles were when the Winchester rifle came out. And then there was Lotus 1-2-3! dBase! Those were the "Wild West" computing years -- lots of fun!🤣

I started on an Apple II plus with Magic Window. It ran on Apple DOS. Then moved on to Wordstar 2000 on CP/M. On a PC, I do remember using various versions of Wordstar unti 1995, then moved on to Word.

LibreOffice thanks.

My first pc in 1992 included a downscale version of ms works. I gladly used it for school I later got my hands of a word perfect copy. It was dos driven. You can see the blue screen and white letters. Looking back it looked so primitive yet it worked. It also had a spell checker.

ChiWriter

I worked at WordPerfect during the time when the word processing war was raging. I remember when Bruce Bastian (may he rest in peace) famously declared that "a mouse does not belong in word processors". Looking back, that might have been the moment WordPerfect lost the battle. Of course, Microsoft's aggressive advertising at the time, with the majority of their budget focused on promoting Word, also played a significant role in their victory. There were also persistent rumors that Microsoft Word leveraged undocumented Windows System API calls to boost its performance-APIs that weren’t made available to WordPerfect, giving Word an unfair advantage. I can't say for sure how true those rumors were since I wasn't a developer, but it certainly added some intrigue to the competition.

The first word processor i used was WordStar... used forever then Word perfect with cardboard key cover.. then once day we got a mouse

And here I was the lone psycho using Ami Pro back in the early 90's.

I could not watch the hole video because of the music and the video jumping up and down...

Anybody else use Smartware or Smartware II? They had a suite of applications including programming capabilities years before Microsoft Office was a thing. As for WordPerfect, I both loved and hated reveal codes - switching to Word and having to fiddle with it blindly to correct formatting problems made me miss being able to actually see why my document had gone wonky! (and easily fix it) Honestly, I usually just use WordPad because I don't like having Word slow me down with all its "helpful" features (CWordPad or Notepad++ are options as well). For spreadsheets Open Office is fine and doesn't try to push everything to the cloud. I only use Office because that's what's on the computer at work. 😅

I love Microsoft's story.

No mention of Locoscript. This was heavily used by UK government for example, at first with dedicated Amstrad PCW series computers and then Dos and Windows.

What the war came down to was being able to open all file formats -- some obsolete. Word was better at it. If I find an old WordStar document or WP file chances are I can force Word 2023 to open it. Great vid and new subscriber!

As a lawyer and firm partner, I lived much of this video. We were the second firm in our city (3rd largest in the state) to install our own computer system in 1979. It was a CPM based system, triple 5" floppy druves, using the retailers own compatible word processor.With a commercial grade pin printer for output it cost us $15,500 in 1979 dollars. We had to hire a dedicated operator/secretary to interface with the computer. We used it for word processing and timekeeping & fee billing. We figured it paid itself off in less than 20 months worth of additional staff not hired. In 1988, my partner refused to spend to replace this antiquated system, so I dissolved the firm and personally spent $6,500 for the best 286 on the market, plus a 1086 (?) for me to learn "how to" on, plus a laser printer that weighed 55 lb, DOS and WordPerfect 5.0. I spent a full weekend at home in my bathrobe learning WordPerfect. My law practice was heavily document based, so a copy of "WordPerfect for Power Users" became my bible. I developed hundreds of forms to assemble using the "merge" feature. My secretary got a complex because it was faster for me to crank out documents directly than to dictate work instructions to her for the same production. I used OS/2 Warp for years, until I had to shift to Windows 98 to be competitive with on-line electronic court filing requirements. WordPerfect for Windows took over, but it ran all of my document library. 98 begat XP, used until I retired in 2016. Originally, WordPerfect captured the legal word processing market because WP incorporated so many features customized for lawyers' use. Word was always a generation out of date by comparison, In time, most law firms started using Word, but the initial motivation was part hype and part a perceived need to use what the other guys were using for format compatibility. Neither were very good reasons to use Word, which in it first several iterations was a slow, unstable mess.

I have used VisiCalc, Lotus 123 and Excel when they were all emerging and current. While Excel seemed slightly quirky after coming from Lotus 123, it didn't take much to get a hang of it. Excel was very easy to use and always had excellent help tools.

All people I know install LibreOffice as some sort of item on "must have software" list which is there only because you can have it for free. Otherwise Office and Word in around ~2000s was crazy popular. Wordstar having two incompatible word processors... most probably they acquired some company that was to be competition and tried using their software - which if you don't make it compatible if a terrible idea. Even Microsoft made a blunder of switching both file formats and some basic GUIs - and while there was compatibility it was limited for new file formats in older Office suites and all that did hurt their market adoption. Thing here is most of this market were pirated home copies of Office for exactly users which didn't need these programs. Such users like me use OpenOffice and later LibreOffice. Most companies and especially bigger ones did continue using MS Office

Used WordPerfect a lot from the late 90s through the mid00s. It was popular in boring law firms.

Balmer cared much more about Windows and mobile than Nadela ever did. Now Microsoft is all about cloud and subscription services 😢

WordPerfect was arcane and not super user friendly. It had a higher learning curve. They failed to anticipate the adoption of Windows 3.1.

I started on the original Wordstar on CP/M back in the late 70's

As the video says, WordPerfect for windows was unstable; I recall it very well. Law firms however loved it. Word ended up a better product.

Final Writer 97 on the Amiga was good!

The frustrating thing was that in the late 90s Wordperfect was much more compatible between versions. If you tried to move Word documents between Word 6/Word 95/Word 97/etc. it was a real mess. The reveal codes feature on Wordperfect was pretty useful too.

Never liked WordPerfect. You had to toggle the screen to see how it would appear. With Microsoft it appeared the way it would be printed.

and Lotus Smart Suite

Without even watching the video, from my observation at the time it was all to do with the wide spread adoption of Windows 3.1. Of course Microsoft had a head start in developing Word for windows. But the time Word Perfect was ported to Windows it was god awful and most users were trained up on Word.

I used Wordstar 2000. It was a great word processor back in the day. A lot of people used wordperfect, I thought it to be a pain in the ASCI file. Ended up having to convert everything to ASCI so Word could read it, but lost a lot during the transition. Had to do a lot of damage control on those files 😅 Wordstar did have a WUSIWUG function.

I used to use PaperClip for the C64. A surprisingly capable word processor for a Commodore, a computer better known for gaming.

$495 for a processor seems too much, no?😳😳