R Wood - what I was using was an $8000 commercial standalone WPS whose name I forget. It was pretty slick. Not long after that it was DECwriters, Wang and Syntrex dedicated WPS.
The stuff on PC's sort of stunk. I worked with two other guys in the late 70's to develop a CP/M based word processor that eventually became a technical writers word processing system and ran a distant #3 to Wordperfect and Wordstar for a couple of years. Still, until wordperfect matured the bigger dedicated boxes were still the way to go.
Staroffice and Openoffice are well rooted. Both are derived from a german company's product which Sun bought some years ago. Basically it was cheaper to buy the company than to buy a copy of Microsoft Office for all of the employees at Sun. Sun eventually released a version of the product into the open source community and that became openoffice. Sun (and others) contribute to openoffice enhancements and bug fixes, and occasionally Sun takes a snapshot of Openoffice, brands it, and sells that commercially with actual tech support.
Another interesting option if you're not into 99,000,000 features is google apps. Their word processor and spreadsheet are fairly dang decent, although I wouldnt count on either being able to execute word/excel macros. Sort of interesting to be able to access "your apps" from any machine and have your documents and spreadsheets online where you can access them from anywhere. Free.
We signed up for a domain name with google, ten bucks a year, and that gives us gmail accounts in the "myname@mydomainname.com", access to all the google apps, a home page, and its all google run. Nice.
