WordPerfect
word processing application
WordPerfect (WP) is a word processing application, now owned by Corel. At the height of its popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the market leader of word processors, displacing the previous market leader, WordStar.
It was originally developed under contract at Brigham Young University for use on a Data General minicomputer in the late 1970s. The authors retained the rights to the program, forming the Utah-based Satellite Software International (SSI) in 1979 to sell it; the program first came to market under the name SSI*WP in March 1980. It was then ported to the MS-DOS operating system in 1982, by which time the name WordPerfect was in use, and several greatly updated versions quickly followed. The application's feature list was considerably more advanced than its main competition, WordStar. Satellite Software International changed its name to WordPerfect Corporation in 1985.
WordPerfect gained praise for its "look of sparseness" and clean display. It rapidly displaced most other systems, especially after the 4.2 release in 1986, and it became the standard in the DOS market by version 5.1 in 1989. Its early popularity was based partly on its superior functionality, availability for a wide variety of computers and operating systems, and also partly because of extensive, no-cost support (even eventually offering "hold jockeys" who entertained users while waiting on the phone).
“WordPerfect” enters the record as word processing application. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what WordPerfect, word and processing can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q174757. VIAF identifies the subject as 177847518. The Library of Congress control number is n86111225. None of the 4 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1980, 1982 and 1985.
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This entry incorporates text from “WordPerfect” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.