WordPerfect

WordPerfect is a word processing application, now owned by Corel.

The program was originally developed under contract at Brigham Young University for use on a Data General minicomputer in 1979. The authors retained the rights to the program, forming Satellite Systems International (SSI) to sell it under the name WordPerfect in 1980. A port to DOS followed in 1982 and several greatly updated versions quickly followed. The application's feature list was considerably more advanced than contemporary DOS applications like WordStar, and it rapidly displaced most other systems, especially after the 4.2 release in 1986. By 1989's 5.1 release, WordPerfect had become a de facto standard in the DOS market.

At the height of its popularity in the 1980s it was a dominant player in the word processor market, but has long since been eclipsed in number of users by Microsoft Word. While best known in its DOS and Microsoft Windows versions, its early popularity was based partly on its availability for a wide variety of computers and operating systems, including Mac OS, Linux, the Apple IIe, a separate version for the Apple IIgs, most popular versions of Unix, VMS, Data General, System/370, AmigaOS, Atari ST, OS/2, and NeXTSTEP.

The common file name extension of WordPerfect document files is .wpd. Older versions of WordPerfect also used file extensions .wp, .wp7, .wp6, .wp5, .wp4, and originally no extension at all.