WordPerfect was developed by Brian Bastion and Dr.Allen Ashton in 1981 at Satellite Software International. Later renamed WordPerfect Corp., the application was ported to the IBM PC in 1982 and was an immediate success, becoming one of the most popular and dominant word processors on the market. The height of it’s appeal was in 1986 with the release of version 4.2, which pushed number one contender Wordstar out of the top spot on the Windows platform. The most successful version however was 5.1 for DOS released in 1989, which included Mac style drop down menus, support for tables, as well as the program’s first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) GUI editor.
WordPerfect for Windows did not appear until 1991, and by then it was too late as Microsoft Word was beginning it’s takeover of the market. Several technological incompatibilities with Windows including the inability to support some languages caused WordPerfect sales to suffer. The product line was sold to Novell in 1994, who incorporated the technology into their GroupWise suite. It was later sold to Corel in 1996, but by then sales had suffered a decline it never recovered from. Corel sells the product today to niche markets. In 2006, Corel announced a new Wordperfect office suite, Wordperfect X3
