WordPerfect was started in
1984 by
Satellite Software International, a company started in
Orem, Utah by
Mormons. At the time, the
champion word processor was
WordStar, with countless other
smaller potatoes (WordStar being the only true
cross-platform word processor at the time. In 1984, people were word processing on anything from
Apple IIs and
Atari 800s to
IBM mainframes and
WANG word processors.) SSI changed their name to WordPerfect Corporation around 1986.
WordPerfect quickly gained in popularity, and was the number one word processor throughout the 80's and early 90's. Somewhere along there, a bratty little company called Microsoft developed Microsoft Word and whittled away at WordPerfect's market dominance with a combination of features and monopoly power, as well as beating WordPerfect to the GUI market. WordPerfect was probably the last great keyboard driven program--many of us who were around in the late 1980s can still remember WordPerfect funtion key commands (Shift-F7 is print, of course.) and are fond fans of reveal codes, which let you see all the formatting information of your document.
WordPerfect's peak was probably WordPerfect 5.1, which is still considered a standard for document interchange and if you have any documents at a law firm they're probably saved in this format. WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS was a fully graphical DOS-based program, and never caught on WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows was the most popular Windows 3.1 version of WordPefect. By the mid 1990s WordPerfect had bought Quattro Pro from Borland and was now selling an office suite which consisted of WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and Presentations.
After that, things get a little fuzzy In 1994, Novell bought WordPerfect under the direction of Bob Frankenberg, who sought to make Novell the next Microsoft. He was not successful, and WordPerfect was sold off to Corel in 1996, not after Novell kept WordPerfect Office which they polished up and made into GroupWise, which is still being made.
Under Corel, WordPerfect has had 4 major releases (WP 7, 8, 9 (also known as 2000) and 10 (WordPerfect Office 2002.) Corel also released a version of WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux to mixed reviews.)
At this time, WordPerfect is less than 10% of the office suite market, but it has a loyal following, especially still in the legal community, where many court briefs cannot be filed in Microsoft Word due to formatting requirements it does not meet. Corel has had numerous management problems as well as financial ones, and may not survive, which would be a sad day for WordPerfect.