The Word Processor Wars: How Microsoft Word Crushed WordPerfect
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- Опубликовано: 13 сен 2024
- Our story begins in 1975 with Michael Shrayer and a program he called the Electric Pencil, officially released in December 1976 for Altair microcomputers. Through his company, he advertised his software in computer magazines such as BYTE and sold the program via mail order. Electric Pencil's market dominance started to decline in the early 80s mainly due to Shrayer’s lack of updates to the software. Many clones appeared as it became more evident that people wanted word processors these included a then little-known company called WordStar which went on to surpass the original Electric Pencil’s which it had copied in popularity. It also didn't help that the popularity of Electric Pencil made it an early target for software pirates. By one estimate, for every copy sold by Eletric Penicil, ten copies were pirated. So Shrayer seemingly not up for the intensifying word processor wars decided to sell the rights to his software. Electric Pencil remained on the market through the 1980s, including a version for the IBM PC in 1983 but by 1982 it had already lost its lead in the word processing market owing to its lack of updates and feature additions.
It would be ironically a product that started its life off as a clone of Electric Pencil that took the market lead. Micropro International debuted its word processor Word Star in 1978 and it quickly became the dominant word processor for the CP/M market. It was feature-rich and mainly target-touch typists who loved its key-based commands and it was also the first WYSIWYG word processor, meaning that the formatting of the document on the computer screen would appear exactly the same as when it was printed out. By 1983, WordStar’s success had made MicroPro International the
largest microcomputer software company in the world, with sales that year reaching $70 million.
But amidst its immense success trouble began brewing. Seymour Rubenstein the founder of MicroPro and the creator of WordStar got into a dispute with the WorldStar development team and depending on who’s telling the story they either quit or were fired. The departure of the development caused WordStar’s next version to be delayed because of this it began losing ground to other Word Processors which were beginning to surpass WordStar with their features. When the new version of WordStar did ship the original development team had changed a lot of the functions of WordStar compared to its original, they replaced the popular key-based commands with a mnemonic layout much to the destain of its touch typist user base. To add to this the new WordStar was incompatible with the original WordStar meaning documents created in either one of the software couldn’t be opened or edited by the other. it was so different that Micrpro decided to launch it as a separate product called WordStar 2000 while simultaneously also still selling the original Wordsatr both were priced the same at $495, this caused mass confusion among consumers as no one knew which was the right one to buy for their specific use case.
One of the word processors that overtook WordStar as it wrestled itself to insolvency was WordPerfect. In 1979, Brigham Young University graduate student Bruce Bastian and computer science professor Alan Ashton created word processing software for a Data General minicomputer system owned by the city of Orem, Utah. The first version of WordPerfect for the IBM PC was released the day after Thanksgiving in 1982. In 1983, the next version of WordPerfect was released for DOS. This was updated to support more print drivers. `They followed up with WordPerfect 4.0 in 1984. ThenWordPerfect 4.2, released in 1986 with each update they added features and improved the interface of the software steadily creating a big user base but they were still behind the market leader WordStar.
The first version of Microsoft Word, initially called "Multi-Tool Word," was released in 1983 for Xenix and MS-DOS systems. Unlike many of its competitors, Word was designed to be a WYSIWYG program from the start. This was a revolutionary concept at the time, as most word processors were text-based and did not display formatting in real time. Another innovative feature of Word was its use of a mouse, which was a novelty for most computer users in the early 1980s. To promote this new way of interacting with the software. In 1985 they released Microsoft Word for the Macintosh which was a graphical user interface apart from MacWrite Apple’s own word processor it was the most popular word processor for Macintosh computers. In 1990, Microsoft released the first version of Office, which bundled Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
01:30 The Story Of Electric Pencil & WordStar
06:14 The Rise Of WordPerfect
12:04 The Rise Of Microsoft Office
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The Canadian army had a standard of Corel Office, which was, at the time, a Canadian company. Thus very much in their best interest. Microsoft swooped in and offered them free licenses and training for MS Office. Something Corel could not afford. Then after a year, MS started charging, but everyone was now fully trained in MS Office. An evil practice to be sure.
There is no doubt in my mind that Gates was a savvy strategist
Well the Chinese are doing it with their cars, like EV's. Parts will be horrendous and then the price will go up.
Sad that a smaller company gets destroyed. I think that's why the EU has prosecuted large corporations ('Merrican) for unscrupulous practices?
I used to use PaperClip for the C64. A surprisingly capable word processor for a Commodore, a computer better known for gaming.
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.
And here I was the lone psycho using Ami Pro back in the early 90's.
I remember -- yes, there were several Ami Pro "rocket scientist" psychos wandering around JPL in those days! You weren't completely alone. 😎
I was using Wordperfect when Samna Ami was launched Wow! What a revelation. A true GUI word processor that was almost perfect right out of the box on day one. As I recall, it became Ami Pro, then Lotus Wordpro, part of Lotus Smart Suite along with 123, and then IBM bought Lotus and killed Smart Suite. Today, MS Word is still badly designed and primitive compared with Samna Ami.
I loved Ami Pro! I didn't know anyone else using it but I got real good at it and impressed people with what it could do. 😊
Law Offices however love their WordPerfect.
Academics love their LaTeX.
@@user-xu5vl5th9n Unmatched with being able to present any mathematical formula.
Maybe it's my ambition to support the underdog, but I always favored Word Perfect over Microsoft Word. Today, I still refuse to use Microsoft Word as my choice is Open Office. It is free, compatible with Word (both documents that are imported, and can be saved in the Word format so those who use Word can see the document) and I see Open Office as more professional looking. Making a professional anything and dumbing it down to a child's toy (***cough*** Windows XP) is downright insulting.
I started on the original Wordstar on CP/M back in the late 70's
My mother - a legal secretary - thought WordPerfect was perfection. She thought using a mouse to make edits/formatting changes was too slow. She was right… but when I saw how much easier Word was I realized it would dominate the mass market.
Of course, MS using its monopoly power in operating systems allowed it to bury Corel/WordPerfect/QuattroPro.
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.
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 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.
No way he actaully said the mouse does not belong in a Word processor. :)
@@Tech_History_Channel Yes he did and he was right in a certain sense that moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse takes time so the function keys are way faster than navigating with a mouse. But what I think he might have forgotten was that there was a shift from professional word processor users to more casual ones and for them the mouse is easier.
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?
I strongly suspected that MS may have tweaked its OS to create glitches with WP when the company I worked at was using WP in a office-wide network setting in the 1990s.
I was sharing office space with the IT department at that engineering company, where the PC network required vigorous monitoring and adjusting the network servers, as for some reason, the WP feature in the network was periodically crashing.
I suggested to the IT manager that MS could have been tweaking elements in the OS to create those problems, as it would motivate companies to switch to Word, where there was a strong possibility the PC network issues would fade away. He thought that was nonsense.
In the meantime, I purposely kept my PC off-line most of the time, using Word, with a dedicated laser printer . . . which hummed along while the rest of the company was burdened with the PC network periodically crashing.
@@bloqk16 I woudn't put it by them; but Word and Excel came to dominate the market before most people had any networking; and it was in the press of the time that MS acted outrageously by not telling other product developers about their undocumented features; which of course MS itself knew about and used to get higher performance. So when magazines like Byte and PC magizine did benchmarks Word and Excel were faster. This convinced people to change because back then processing power was limited and you might be talking hours longer to do a big spreadsheet or mail merge. I don't know why these companies didn't join in a class action lawsuit against Microsoft; maybe they were intimated because MS did run the OS of choice; they might have also tried teaming up with digital research and not making versions for MSDOS but they didn't and they lost out.
@@litestuffllc7249 They did sue. But the justice system in the US is not exactly not ignorant about technical matters. So, the lawsuit did conclude in 2012 (!) and Microsoft did not lose. Insufficient evidence.
Used WordPerfect a lot from the late 90s through the mid00s. It was popular in boring law firms.
The first word processor i used was WordStar... used forever then Word perfect with cardboard key cover.. then once day we got a mouse
We had WordStar too!
I remember learning to use it on a Kaypro at a computer store in the early 80's.
Here's a few things that weren't mentioned:
① Some say Lotus _AmiPro_ was initially a better program than the Microsoft Word for Windows. Then Microsoft copied many things from the _AmiPro_ interface.
② Some say the only real difference between _Word 6.0_ and _Word for Windows 95_ was that the latter used and presented long files names. My memory is that they were essentially the same program with some aesthetic/presentation improvements…like long file names in modal windows.
③ _Microsoft Word_ did introduce OLE, which was very useful, but you soon learnt that linking was much better than embedding because if the container file object, AKA "the document", was corrupted, you also lost all the contained children file objects, unless you did some fairly low-level editing with the file with a hex editor. And this applied to Microsoft's own internal objects. Learning how to save those things as a file could save much time, work, frustration, and worry.
④ The documents of early versions of _Microsoft Word_ could be very large compared to some other word processors or how much disk space you had, especially if you used OLE.
⑤ Microsoft did realise TTF much better than Apple did, until your installed TTF file name identifiers exceeded the 255 character string limit in the Windows 95 or 98 registry key. This would then supervene some interesting problems. Effectively, you had to add or remove TTF files depending on the document you were editing, and sometimes you had to reboot.
⑥ Microsoft Word, traditionally, has had %^##! colour fidelity. I remember printing documents in which the pink and purple on the "WYSIWYG" screen were purple and pink, respectively. That's a problem if the the document says something like "it can clearly be seen that the pink bar is longer than the purple bar" when the purple bar is longer!
⑦ There were many problems with Windows 95 or 98 and language dialects, depending on, and I kid you not, the permutation of changes you made to both the OS and Microsoft Word. One such frustration was being forced to use a US spelling checker for a document being edited on an OS set to use UK spelling.
⑧ Supposedly, leaked emails from around 2010? suggest Microsoft actually didn't care if people copied/pirated Office, because they knew most people are lazy, and will become familiar with and dependent on their standard. And here we are!
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!
thanks for the sub!
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.
I was using MS Works at that time. It was a remarkable suite of apps that came pre-loaded on my PC, a real bargain when compared to MS Word.
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.
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.
I loved Quarto Pro.
@@dagda825 that's a spreadsheet.. lotus 123, excell type program
and Lotus Smart Suite
Like many lawyers in the U.S. I still use WordPerfect. It is so much more capable.than Word it is absurd. Hell, OpenOffice is better than Word. I have a copy of Word only because some other programs I use still require it. Otherwise I would dump it in a shot.
Yes! I forgot to mention at the end that in the law profession and in some academic circles, Wordperfect is still widely used and seen as superior to word :)
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.
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.
This makes me feel so old being born in 1975 we had no computers when I was growing up.
But I bet your younger years were quite an exciting time, having a front row seat to quite possibly one of the most revolutionary periods in human history!!!
I was born in 1950 and taught myself how to use a donated DOS computer back in the 1990s. The early internet was just text messages. No pictures, no music, no video, no web surfing, etc. There were BBS (Bulletin Board Services) that you joined so you could send text messages to other people and groups of people. Instead of a website they had a phone number you dialed on the dialup modem. This all began to change after 1995. A group of students at the University of Minnesota wrote a program called Gopher. This led to the first web browser called Netscape. This was the beginning of the modern internet.
@xKynOx I was born in 1971, grew up using cp/m computers at home and apple 2 e in school. Commodore 64s too
$495 for a processor seems too much, no?😳😳
@ntsakomakhubela771 This was a business tool in that day... not consumer. 500 Bux would be more like 1500 today. I had a pirated copy of workstation 3.31 on my cp/m computer
At least you owned a copy now you spend that a year for the subscription and don’t own a copy of the software
@@modernscholar02 That's why I avoid subscriptions. I go on eBay and get slightly older versions with an installation disc.
All these stories seem to end with Microsoft winning 😂
Unfortunately :)
The unethical companies tend to win out over ethical ones
Do you know the story of where DOS came from? Bill Gates hired engineers to reverse engineer CP/M. Technically illegal, but he got away with it. Microsoft has gotten away with lots of shady practices over the years. Which is why they now get in trouble with the Europeans.
Fun fact: All doc and docx files are really just zip files that contain xml files outlining the format/content of document and a big folder for media inside of the document. That's why it takes so long to open and save.
this kinda blows my mind
OpenOffice FTW!
It was really the Macintosh and Windows WYSIWYG that killed WordStar, WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
Yep it was
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.
I could not watch the hole video because of the music and the video jumping up and down...
Me too. But I slept through most of it because of the crappy images. Yuck
Vibrating photo effects make this video unwatchable
It's poorly narrated as well. Life is too short; so I clicked away.
I used fewer vibrating effects in my latest uploadsand made a few changes, let me know if it's a more bearable to watch, thanks for your feedback!
@@fliznit4986 I had to use close captions
Final Writer 97 on the Amiga was good!
I used a WP for my C-64 which I typed in from code provided in a Commodore magazine. For a spreadsheet, I used Microsoft Multiplan. However, after installing a chip- based disk speed-up utility, I found that the utility used RAM which Multiplan also used, corrupting data files. Moved to MS-DOS machine shortly thereafter. Used WordStar 2.0 for Windows and loved it. I'd use it today, but it's 16-bit software which will not run on 64-bit Windows.
I used Word 1.0 for DOS. It was not a good product. It also wasn't WISIWYG except in a preview mode where you had limited if any ability to edit the doc (it was a long time ago, details are fuzzy). The commands were all these multi-character sequences that were terrible to remember. WordPerfect was a much better app at that time. But you've got to hand it to Microsoft, they kept improving it. The early Windows version of Word were much better.
While doing the research I also thought it was a bit of a stretch to call the Word 1.0 for DOS a wysiwyg but that's how it was marketed but in the end they built quite a good Word processor.
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.
You might do a history of the different Word versions, particularly the messy transition between Word 5.1a and Word 6.0 on Macs.
Great idea, I will add to my video ideas list. Thanks!
The "under water screen" was great in WP 5.1.
LaTex is the best💛
Thank you 😊😊
You are very welcome :)
Ami Pro was a fantastic word processor. It had great graphics facilities. Much more useful than Word.
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.
pfs:Write
LOL the rise of privacy @ $495 in 1976 just made it clear to rip off this junk.
Long live Mac Write.
@@chebrubin never heard of mac write
You need a new mic.
Yep I bought a new one, that I used in my latest uploads,still figuring out how to edit its audio though but do let me know whether the sound quality has improved
ChiWriter
However