Ah I see, well maybe you are right. I only remember Wordperfect being like the best word processor back in the days. But only saw the .doc file format until M$ Office.
These is a few screenshots from WP earlier versions including the DOS era.
https://winworldpc.com/product/wordperfect/3x-dos
RE: Digital Archaeology: Floppy Disk #14 – FEMALE.DOC
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There were also DOS versions of Microsoft Word and those files would have used the .DOC extension. I was able to open them up with Notepad++ (which is how I took the screenshots) and except for some unreadable characters at the beginning and end, it displays the text just fine which is why I think these were just DOS text files.