Does anybody out there remember using Word Perfect 5.1? We used to use it for doing mass mailings. Forget about graphical user interfaces. This was plain beautiful blue background with white text. It was actually pretty powerful. We used to print thousands of address labels and merged letters with it. There weren’t too many fonts, but you could buy nice fonts. It got even better with 6.0 which came with a binary editor. You could edit any file. Good stuff. It was a simpler time. And by simpler, I mean more complicated for the end user. Let’s face it Microsoft Word is much easier these days than Word Perfect 5.1 ever was.

If you still feel the need to get back to WordPerfect 5.1 under Windows 7 or 8, you’ll need to get an emulator. There are a few things you can do. You can download DosBox, which is great if you want to run old DOS programs. You can also download Oracle VirtualBox. If you use VirtualBox, you’ll need a copy of whatever operating system under which you’ll run WP5.1. That means, you’ll have to have an old copy of DOS, or Windows 3.1, 95, 98, XP, or Vista.