For many years in education Word Perfect was the standard. Who can forget the blue screen with white text? Later Windows versions were actually quite good I thought, but by then Microsoft Word was starting to win the word processing war and Word Perfect started to become less cohesive as a package and changed owners frequently, which certainly didn't help. Ironically I have the latest version Corel Word Perfect (X4) loaded on my work computers as an alternative to Word 2007.
At any rate if you would like to read the inside story on this very important software and how it came into being, then I recommend a visit to http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml to read the story.
Dan