You selected the option you wanted by typing the number corresponding to the name of the option. WordPerfect 5.1 and versions before it gave you text menus. However, the new keyboard shortcuts are listed on the menu bar instead of in a help document, so it’s not too hard to readjust.īut other things are very different. Again, following Windows conventions instead of the way WordPerfect handled it in the past. Help is F1 now, not F3, and ESC is now the “go back a menu” key instead of F1. But a few of the others didn’t survive the transition. You could activate bold type and underline by typing F6 and F8 respectively, or you could hit CTRL-B and CTRL-U like in every Windows word processor. A lot of keyboard shortcuts were altered to be more like the standard Windows ones.
So naturally this version of DOS WordPerfect borrows a lot of ideas from Windows. Apparently this version didn’t come out until 1997, eight years after 5.1, after WordPerfect had changed hands twice (to Novell and then to Corel), after the game-changing Windows 95 had been out for over a year, and after WordPerfect 7 for Windows had been out for several months. I played around with this version of WordPerfect a bit, thinking it would be nothing more than an incremental update, but it’s actually quite a bit different than the classic program I spent six months learning back in the early 1990s. It has a few issues, but I think those might be the fault of the vDOSWP installer, which was kind of glitchy. It installed like a dream, and it actually works perfectly (lol) in vDOS.
So, while looking for a completely legal solution to this problem, I found an abandonware site with all sorts of versions of WordPerfect, so I decided to try the latest version of DOS WordPerfect, version 6.2. The ancient floppy disks I was using were corrupted, presumably from being baked in the desert heat in my parents’ dusty shed in the backyard. Remember that I had serious problems actually getting 5.1 to work. Yes, I actually took that screenshot in DOSBox running Corel WordPerfect 6.2. The menu bar had different options from the standard WP51 menu bar, and the path on the bottom of the screen was not C:\WP51, but C:\COREL\WP62. I’m sure some of you may have noticed my “WordPerfect 5.1” screenshot in my last post looked a little “off”.
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