WordPerfect

WordPerfect (WP) is a word processing application, now owned by Alludo. At the height of its popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the market leader of word processors, displacing the prior market leader WordStar.

It was originally developed under contract at Brigham Young University for use on a Data General minicomputer in the late 1970s. The authors retained the rights to the program, forming the Utah-based Satellite Software International (SSI) in 1979 to sell it; the program first came to market under the name SSI*WP in March 1980. It then moved to the MS-DOS operating system in 1982, by which time the name WordPerfect was in use, and several greatly updated versions quickly followed. The application's feature list was considerably more advanced than its main competition WordStar. Satellite Software International changed its name to WordPerfect Corporation in 1985.

WordPerfect gained praise for its "look of sparseness" and clean display. It rapidly displaced most other systems, especially after the 4.2 release in 1986, and it became the standard in the DOS market by version 5.1 in 1989. Its early popularity was based partly on its superior functionality, availability for a wide variety of computers and operating systems, and also partly because of extensive, no-cost support (even eventually offering "hold jockeys" who entertained users while waiting on the phone).

Its dominant position ended approximately two to three years after the first release for Microsoft Windows; the company reported Microsoft did not initially share its Windows Application Programming Interface (API) specifications, causing the WordPerfect for Windows application to be slow. After WordPerfect received the Windows APIs, there was a long delay in reprogramming before introducing an improved version. Microsoft Word had been introduced at the same time as their first attempt, and while WordPerfect initially enjoyed the highest market share of word processors for Windows, in a matter of years, Word took over the market because it was faster, employed aggressive corporate sales contracts, and was promoted by aggressive bundling deals that ultimately produced Microsoft Office. WordPerfect Corporation was sold to Novell in 1994, which then sold the product to Corel in 1996. WordPerfect was no longer a popular standard by the late '90s. Corel (since rebranded as Alludo) has made regular releases to the product since then, often in the form of office suites under the WordPerfect name that include the Quattro Pro spreadsheet, the Presentations slides formatter, and other applications.

The common filename extension of WordPerfect document files is .wpd. Older versions of WordPerfect also used file extensions .wp, .wp7, .wp6, .wp5, .wp4, and originally, no extension at all.