Pretty trippy. This requires a licensed copy of WordPerfect, which Corel no longer sells. They gave the rights to a woman who operates by email with the handle thewp51lady@att.net: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/links.html#obtain
After reading those paragraphs I'd be inclined to just pirate the damn thing. It's very confusing. I can't tell if you actually get a license if you order from that random lady or if it's just replacement disks. There's a long section afterward about how to obtain a license key and it's basically "scour the used market and pray that you don't get scammed".
You may have quite a challenge on your hands with that approach. WordPerfect for DOS is a very complicated piece of software that comes with a 600+ page paper manual. The program is absolutely chock-full of keyboard shortcuts and hidden functionality. It's not discoverable the way a modern GUI application would be.
Buying it on eBay may be one of the only legal ways to get your hands on that manual. Though I suppose you could also look for a 3rd-party book, it may not cover every feature of the application.
Lots of people got 80% of the way there with one of those keyboard templates -- a plastic overlay that fits around your function keys and tells you what it does by itself, and when combined with Shift/Ctrl/Alt, and in the margins explains some other useful keys. But it's easier to learn by word of mouth -- when everyone around you is using it and you can ask the person next to you. Obviously that route doesn't work anymore! So people might actually read the manual.
WP had excellent documentation. It came with a “workbook” for step-by-step learning and with a separate full reference manual.
MS Office’s documentation is a travesty. Most appalling is how MS has given up on having help files. It used to come with good “online help” - back when that meant that it was on your system, not on the Internet. They’ve since just removed all help so that when you ask for help, the first thing you get is “searching Office Online.”
I had a pretty decent idea how Word worked 20 years ago. Now I just thrash about in there and click stuff and Google for random webpages for help.
