Comment by gcanyon
6 months ago
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I worked with DOS in… WordPerfect? I don’t remember for sure which word processing application it was. But I honestly don’t remember ever seeing anything remotely “graphic“ in my DOS days.
Oh, there was.
WordPerfect 6 had a full GUI mode with a very vaguely Win3-like GUI implemented in DOS.
Borland Quattro Pro had one too.
Microsoft Word could be flipped in and out of it: in it, you got WYSIWYG bold, italic, underline etc, and more lines on screen, but otherwise the UI remained much the same.
PowerQuest imitated Win95 so well in PartitionMagic it was pixel-perfect.
It was entirely a thing in the late DOS era. It let DOS apps look competitive, and yet demand far lower system requirements and run on much older machines than one needed for Windows.
My time with WP ended with version 3? maaaybe 4
Are you sure? Your earlier comments expressed uncertainty if it was WordPerfect at all.
WordPerfect on the PC was a very niche app before version 4.2 which was the big hit. I knew a tiny handful of places that had copies of the older version but they weren't running it.
It is on the edge of before my time -- I started my first job in late 1988 -- but before WP 4.2, WordStar still dominated, with some specialist users running DisplayWrite or MultiMate. I'm not American and I think the US market was different with shareware taken slightly more seriously, so more presence of PC Write, and maybe XyWrite or other tools little seen in the British Isles.