I grew up on Wordperfect 4.2 (and later, 5.1). I remember the day I started using it. My dad, seeing me struggling with the limited feature set of
Bank Street Writer on my
Commodore 64, sat me down in front of what was to become my first
x86 machine. Piece by piece, he explained WordPerfect... Reveal Codes, the function keys, creating macros... it was a new world of flexibility.
Years later, I still have muscle-memories for WP commands. They're fading, yet sometimes I still reflexively hit F6 to bold, or Shift-F7 to print.
WordPerfect, like vi, offered a purity of interface that today's WYSIWYG word processors cannot match. Working in WordPerfect was a dream of intellectual cleanliness: no toolbars, no fonts, no other tasks... just you and your document, sequestered from the world.