Word Perfect 5

This DOS-based word processing product was the darling of the legal industry for many years. So much so that today there are still employees within the industry who will state, “It was easier to do xyz in Word Perfect - I hate Word!”

The human brain tends to be linear in it's processes when typing and formatting documents. Turn on a format such as “Bold” and type what you want to be bolded. Turn off the “bold” format when you come to the end of the word, phrase or sentence. MS Word and many contemporary word processing programs rely on an “Object based” model and contain an inherent hierarchy. Thus, formatting a piece of a document can have unexpected results on other portions depending on which hierarchical level to which that formatting was applied.

An other important feature of Word Perfect was the 'under water' view, in which you could see the codes in the text. Very useful if you wanted to find out where you had put the wrong formatting code that messed up your lay out.