It’s been a while since we’ve taken a look at a Computer Chronicles episode, so tonight I thought it might be fun to take a look at this 1992 episode on Word Perfect.
Word Perfect was a very popular piece of word processing software in the 90’s and early 90’s, only relenting dominance of the market when Microsoft Word, part of Microsoft Office, began to take over in the Windows 95 era.
In the early days of computing the word processor was, to many, the “killer app” for the entire concept of the personal computer — a good word processing program could do far more than any typewriter could, and do it more quickly and Word Perfect quickly became the standard in this field, being very easy to use but also far more powerful than many options on the market. It was available for DOS, Windows, and Macintosh platforms, meaning not only could pretty much anyone use it, but they could share projects without formatting issues.
This was still true in 1992, when this episode of the Computer Chronicles was filmed and aired.
The episode itself is pretty run of the mill for Computer Chronicles, opening with host Stuart Cheifet browsing software in a store — something lost in the modern “download everything” digital world we live in. Following that we get an example of Word Perfect in use on a Macintosh in an oddly grisly demonstration – a document about someone who died in the Delta Airlines Flight 191 crash. That’s honestly kind of morbid, even for me.
Beyond that the episode flows as normal, demonstrating the capabilities of the program on Macintosh System 7, Windows 3.1, MS-DOS, and even UNIX! It’s honestly rather impressive how widespread Word Perfect really was, or I should say, is at the time, since it still exists, albeit in a much lesser form than 30 years ago.
Of course the chance to show off the “latest and greatest” version of Word Perfect isn’t missed, nor is a chance to see some add-on software for the program, to expand its already impressive capabilities.
Of course the episode ends with computer news regarding MS-DOS 6.0, a new version of Word Perfect (newer than the version shown in the episode, funny how that is) and an update on the Newton! Yep, really sets the time frame for you.
All in all, an interesting episode if you really care about the history of computers beyond gaming — otherwise, it may be a bit boring, but as someone who writes for fun, well, this little snapshot of word processing history is quite welcome.