What Happened to WordPerfect? The Word Processor That Owned Every Law Office

In 1990, if you walked into a law firm anywhere in the United States and looked at a secretary's monitor, you saw a blue screen with nothing on it. No menus. No toolbar. One line of small white text in the corner telling you which page you were on. That was WordPerfect, and it held more than seventy percent of the word processing market on earth. It was written by a computer science professor and a former college marching band director, for the city of Orem, Utah, on a minicomputer. Its company gave away unlimited free telephone support by toll-free telephone, forever, and employed people whose whole job was to keep you entertained while you were on hold. It sold to Novell for one point four billion dollars in 1994, and Novell sold it to Corel twenty months later for about a hundred and ten million. The usual explanation is that WordPerfect missed Windows. That is true and it is not the interesting part. This video is about what actually happened: the company's greatest strength was ten million secretaries who could operate it faster than they could describe what they were doing, and Windows did not beat that strength. It deleted it. And WordPerfect never died. You can buy it today. There is also a coda about the two men who wrote it, who ended up on opposite sides of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, each giving a million dollars. Bruce Bastian died in June 2024. CHAPTERS 0:00 A blue screen with nothing on it 0:55 Orem, Utah, 1979 1:33 The marching band director 2:32 The clause that created a company 3:11 Why the screen was empty 4:24 Forty commands on ten keys 6:30 Reveal Codes 8:13 A thousand printer drivers 9:09 Why the lawyers came 11:17 Free support, forever 12:34 WordPerfect 5.1 13:55 The bet on OS/2 15:23 The moat that got deleted 16:51 Novell, and a memo dated 3 October 1994 20:16 What actually killed it 22:34 Ashton, Bastian, and Proposition 8 23:45 It never actually died SOURCES AND IMAGE CREDITS Full image credits in the pinned comment. Archive stills are public domain, CC0 or CC BY / CC BY-SA, credited to their authors. The WordPerfect, WordStar, MS-DOS and Windows screens shown in this video were recreated from the original 80x25 text mode for this documentary; the typeface is VileR's reconstruction of the IBM VGA 9x16, CC BY-SA 4.0. #AmericanObsolete #WordPerfect #TechHistory #retrotech