I got the hang of it, did some customizing so that it would run a complicated TV-log macro, and when it moved to Windows, I climbed on board.

It was arguably easier to use, even though it required disk-flopping from a storage container the size of a toaster. After that, we had regularly fire drills.Īnd then, roaring down the digital gravel road, came Microsoft Word for DOS.

I digress, but I actually witnessed a hard drive go up in smoke. In those days, you installed the dozen-or-so WordPerfect floppies onto the hard drive and prayed that the drive wouldn’t crash. Twenty megs is about what a fancy Photoshop image might consume today. That’s megabytes, not gigabytes or terabytes, by the way. My first was a 20-meg monster that set me back more than $500. Other at-the-time revolutionary features required more floppy-swapping. If you wanted to spell-check, you had to insert the spell-check floppy. But it was slow, cumbersome and required users to refer often to its manual, which was large and heavy and read like it was written by wonks whose first language was software code. At the time, in the last century, WordPerfect was the undisputed king of word processors. My last encounter with WordPerfect was in the days when PCs ran on DOS 2.12 and had two 5 1/4-inch floppy drives.

Wordperfect office free trial