The screen is covered by that nasty standard blue tone, a few grey plain text letters, and a mesmerizingly blinking big-ass-block-cursor. It’s 2023 and I might be wondering how I ended up here if it wasn’t for my intention to do so. The more-than-nostalgia-spreading visual filling my screen is the word processing application LetterPerfect 1.0 for DOS from 1990. A stripped-down version of WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, which was released one year prior to its light-weight heir. Basically, its conceptual approach focused on less capable machines, like early laptops. That made it an inexpensive entry-level product for students and personal use. Although it lacks a bunch of its bigger sibling’s features like tables, styles, equation editing, or sorting, it was said to be a pretty powerful application. However, it seems like this fact didn’t hit the public opinion, making LetterPerfect a quite unsuccessful release. De facto, the exact opposite of its devisor WordPerfect 5.1, the most successful release of the WordPerfect Corporation.
Now I’m sitting here with my surrounding covered in a dull blue glow from the screen’s background color, writing about the piece of software I’m writing in. It feels like a time travel recursion. At first glance, it doesn’t give me much of a toil. You can call me an antiquated stubborn, but I’m writing my blog posts in a text editor anyway. Just plain text, no fancy extras. Besides LetterPerfect is in some way capable of formatting,? I don’t use it, because I don’t need it. Bold and italic fonts, underlining, and support for graphics insertion sound quite nice. But since even margins and text alignment aren’t any of my concerns, I will focus on the look and feel of the program.
In general, it visualizes exactly what you would expect from a DOS program. A raw but clean approach, since it uses text mode and no graphical twinkle. The user interface suggests the basic concept of what we are used to nowadays. Mouse support (even though not mandatorily required), drop-down menus in the top bar, and some cursor position info in the right bottom corner of the screen. The menu bar suggests pretty straightforward handling. Until you expand one of the main categories. The functionalities of most options are quite common with modern equivalents. However, their naming can get you pretty confused, if you were solely using contemporary applications. ‘Retrieve’ instead of ‘open’, or the concept of ‘Delete/Undelete’ instead of ‘Undo/Redo’ puts some type of learning curve to it. But once figured out, it doesn’t make any difference anymore. At this point, I could dive into the thesaurus feature or record macros, though why pottering at something I will never use. However, that doesn’t keep me from digging through all options, just to see what it can do. One thing, that seems quite appealing is the color scheme setting. It might have sounded a bit fussing at the beginning of this article when I was complaining about the odd blue and gray glowing screen paint. The ‘Setup’ option disabused me by offering different color settings. Still, each of the available patterns is quite retro in terms of the color palette. But it provides a nice touch of variety for your eyes’ receptors. There is even our beloved dark mode at hand, black background – grey letters (or inverted if you prefer that). Now, the program doesn’t look or even feel that much different from the regular text editor I’m using for writing my posts. Besides … maybe one day I will extend my approach of exploring this little DOS gem and try to wrap my mind around the vast amount of not-yet-discovered features. But working with it comprehensively?

Factually speaking, there is no justifiable use case for this stone-age application in the modern world. Not because of its features or presentation. But for the platform it is running on. It wouldn’t make any sense to carry around a 5kg laptop from 1990 including a most likely torn-down battery, to work on simple texts. The big ‘however’ although, is the sheer interest and feeling of using such an old piece of software. And it feels rewarding to create something new with old technology.
Maybe I will write another post or story, or even some letter, with this appreciated editor. A perfect letter, from the past.

An interesting read, for more time travel experience, a review of LetterPerfect from the 1990 October issue of InfoWorld magazine:
https://jvlone.com/computerpub/InfoWorld/IW_1990-10-29_x-x_LetterPerfect10.pdf
A small summary of LetterPerfect’s features and history from Daniel Rose:
https://www.danielsays.com/ssg-dos-lp10.html