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Microsoft Word 5.1: The Apex of Word Processing
angkor writes "'Word 5.1 is 13 years old in 2004. Many people still swear by it. Powerful features, stable application, without bloat. Nirvana by Microsoft. It's been all downhill from there...' I always thought WordPerfect 5.1 was pretty good as well. I still use it alongside my OfficeXP."
or at...
Odd how people swear by Word 5.1, when all I seem to manage with Word XP is to swear at it.
I gave up on word the day I clicked on a menu and an hourglass appeared. :(
There was probably a DOS Word 5 too.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
WP peaked at 5.1, Word peaked at 5.1 - any other products for which 5.1 was the magic version number?
I thought notepad was enough! I never knew there was another way!
MS Word jumped from like 2.0 to 5.1 to "catch up" with Wordperfect.
Sure many people use them for more then that, but you might be suprised how many don't
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I prefer the document coding that they switched to with 6 -- splitting the font size from font selection codes.
Fight Spammers!
personally i use office 97, it has some nice features like envelope and label printing (did the old version have it?)
only thing about it is it is NOT fully compatible with files saved with office 2000, in my experience.
if you have a word 2000 doc with images all layed out, they will be, in most cases, positioned differently when opened in word 97.
note: you can also use the free word viewer. (there is also a powerpoint/excel viewer)
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
and Windows 3.1 was da bomb!
5.1Win/Mac: ***Ommmmmmmmmmmm*** XP2003: f**K! f**K! f**K! f**K! Mac2004: Well, at least I'm not using Windows!
It's been all downhill from sed if you ask me.
By the low standards that we have set today, old versions of Word are very nice.
Time for some band of grad students to start putting together the next generation tool that takes the bad new features out of word processing, makes the good new features more smoothly integrated with the rest and more efficient and finally that re-learns from modern users what a word-processor is for.
That last is HARD. Word processors use to be used strictly to produce documents which would be printed. Today the primary use is for producing text documents that will be sent to others electronically that may or may not contain complex objects like images, graphs, etc.
These are different problem domains, but separating out the one from the other and re-solving the problem correctly is never easy.
"Microsoft Office 2003 Professional, Where do you want to go today?"
Even for years after I stopped using it, I had my editor aliased to "word" in DOS because I was so used to starting it that way.
As a casual user, I simply cannot live without the ability to insert MediaPlayer G2 controls into my correspondence... therefore 5.1 will not work for me.
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
#
n/t
I would agree that Word 5.1 might have been the best word processor ever, but only for people who don't want or need too much out of a word processor. On the other hand, what Word 5.1 did was about all 95% of the public needed, and it did that 95% pretty well. Still, other word processors such as Ami (PC-only) did was 5.1 did but perhaps even better.
Word Perfect 5.1 was by far the best word processor I've ever used. I liked reading in fixed-width fonts, the color scheme was great, but most importantly it was a dream to use.
Sure, today's word processors look fancy, and offer more intuitive styling as well as presenting what the final product will looks like. But I was more productive with WP51 than any other word processor today.
I'm still kicking myself for losing those install disks. I'd love to still be using it today, but I'm too lazy (and law-abiding) to try to find it on the 'net. Also, I doubt it'll work with my inkjet.
For people who can't handle \LaTeX
Word 5.1 did not have clippy... the most important thing which was ever integrated into a word processor.
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria!!!!!!
*cough* LaTeX *coughcough*
...you're just playing around
Same goes for the whole office suite doesn't it?
Wasn't it possible back then to create a Powerpoint presentation that would run standalone from a floppy disk (that is, Powerpoint didn't have to be installed on the target machine)?
I know most people carry their presentations with them on a laptop these days, but I always thought it was handy to be able to use on-site equipment if only as a backup. Now this notion only works if you install Powerpoint everywhere.
Nevermind, I answered my own question.
A nightmare of configuring printer drivers hell in DOS Word. And that I had to burn a new EPROM in printer to support a native language characters in hardware.
There you are, staring at me again.
WordPerfect allows a simultaneous left and right align on the same line of text. Do you know how many school papers start out with a title on the left and my name on the right? That feature alone has kept me loyal to WordPerfect for twelve years. Of course, the 'Reveal Codes' feature is da bomb. It's a good mix between WYSIWYG and the bit twiddling word processors. I don't know how the average programmer can do without it.
The Netscape codebase that would have become version 5 was released under the MPL and became Mozilla. After two years of work Mozilla 1.0 was released, upon which a new Netscape product was based. Because so much change had happened from the 5.0 codebase it was proper to version it 6.
Netscape 5 did exist, but was never released as a product.
This may be the one problem with commercial software: bloat due to features added for the sake of a new version to sell. I guess bug and security fixes just aren't sexy enough.
Maybe I should upgrade to 5.1.
Word 2.0 stores the paragraph characteristics (formatting, font, etc.) in the "paragraph mark". If you copy/paste a PM, you get all the attributes. Word '97 uses some screwy method that I haven't figured out yet (after six years) so I still use Word 2.0.You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
When I was in college it was common to purchase Wrod 6.0 and then pay a $100 downgrade fee in order to obtain Word 5.1a. Of course this was on the Mac, and 6.0 was an abomination on the Mac since it was an oddball port of the Windows version.
Lasers Controlled Games!
are all people visiting at slashdot.org using all Linux related products? shouldn't we or should we?
Gramatica is THE best grammar checker I have ever used. It was written by a couple of PhD's in English who happened to get into computer science fairly early on. The triviality and incorrectness of Word's current grammar checker is appalling since Gramatica did a MUCH better job 10 years ago.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'm sure some people swear by it, but like all advances (Word 5.1 up to 2003, CLI to GUI, etc.) it's really more a form of nostalgia than praise.
For example, I recently tried to pawn off an older PC with an old Linux distribution to my little brother. It had everything most people would need: a word processor, a web browser, etc. However, the word processor didn't do mail merges (something he needed for a class), the browser didn't support Flash, etc. To me, it was functional. To him, it was "broken".
I agree that a simple GUI is great for some people, but it isn't for everything. If there was honestly nothing that could be improved since the early versions of word processors, no one would be buying the Office/Appleworks/Corel Office applications of today.
The fact that I had a secretary recently freak out because the CEO's name wasn't highlighted in Word and automatically showed his meeting schedule (Smart Tags), shows that people generally get used to what they're using. That's what most people reminisice about.
and am watching the movie all these days on a 2.1 :((
For it's brief mention in your comment, WordPerfect 5 is much more sworn by today and enjoyed much more widespread use than Word 5. Those were the golden days - while WP was still king and before everyone switched to the word processor put out by that operating system company, what was it? - Microsoft?
Another thing worth mentioning is that was in the day's before suites really took off - when generally you bought a word processor by itself. Not packaged with a bunch of stuff you rarely used and matched with a bloated price. You would also buy the spreadsheet software separately and it was not uncommon to use products from two different vendors as standards - for example, WordPerfect and Lotus 123 were common standards.
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We had wordperfect 5.1 installed in all of the computer labs that I worked in back at university. If you took the floppy out of the drive, it was toast and virtually unrecoverable. Everyday, at least one person would complain about losing their paper or some such. Many a session was spent in complete fear, rivulets of sweat dripping from my face, as one of the rather large football players stood angrily over my shoulder waiting for me to retrieve their data.
...Well not the football players... you know, the people I could take (english majors mostly).
It got to the point where I'd ask them if they'd taken the disk out of the drive. They'd say "yep" and I'd say "Yeah... Don't do that".
So, not fondly remembered.
-k
How to avoid corrupt documents
TipsAndGotchas
In one of these links they say that cut-n-pasting from the web will break documents. I agree since I actually experienced it and switched to OpenOffice!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
and menus responded with vigor
Vigor? Word 5.1 had Clippy already? That's impressive! (Screenshot / Home page)
ROFL R.Sole don't you get it?
a person identifying themselves as R.Sole as in ARSEHOLE
Come on people open your eyes!!!
I always preferred WordPerfect to Word.
WordPerfect 5.1 was a god-send for its time. 6 was okay, 7 was a dog, but it was all fixed in 8. WP has continued on steadily, but hasn't bloated since 8. WP 10 (which I currently use) has some great new features (print to PDF), but it's basically the same as 8. The file format is even compatible all the way back to WP 6.
IMHO, WP 8 was an awesome product. It just worked. There were no constant layout glitches, I never had to fight it to get what I wanted, the interface was clean, there were well-know hot-keys for just about everything, and most of all, its system requirements didn't increase significantly at each release. It runs smooth and fast. And it was significantly cheaper than Word.
-- This post spellchecked by WordPerfect 10 --
I thought it was/is vim 6.1 !!!
.
What's wrong with LaTeX?
Nothing, but real authors use troff. -- AS Tannenbaum
Word 4 was Word 5 without the bloat. It was much faster and nearly file compatible with 5.0 (I remember there were a few hacks that would make it compatible..). Word 5.0 was crappy and buggy which is why Word 5.1 is being mentioned.
IMO, the only reason that Word 5.1 is remembered with fondness was that Word 6 was so bad that it was unusable. It was also when I stopped reading mainstream computer mags after MacWorld proclaimed it the best wordprocessor available... (that and the article about vdt radiation pushed by an editor with stock in a company that made "anti-radiation" screens...)
I love running Word 5.1 on my older macs in OS 9, its soooooo much faster than 98 or 2001. Even running it in Classic as a fast-opening, fairly capable word processor isn't a bad idea. I've still got all the original install floppies for the Entire '92 Office Suite for Mac.... ah, the good old days!
Oh well, there goes your theory. No multi-million dollar government grant for you!
However, several times I've seen a whole group of Word power users (not clueless lusers) need to given up on a document and start over from scratch -- usually just on little things like the company business plan or 12 month road map (urk). The only workaround each time was to copy/paste the original document text into a new Word file, because Word was hopelessly confused by whatever little magic cookies it had left in the original document.
I.e. I know it's not just me being confused, I see this happen to everyone who uses Word heavily on big documents, sooner or later.
To be charitable, this may be the eventual fate of any huge app that grows by accretion from a small program to a hugely enormous giganto app, without being redesigned and recoded and refactored along the way.
So yeah, Word -- nice when it works, I guess, but it can be quite frustrating other times.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
I know, I know, the 1970s called and they want their application back, but really-- if you want to work with fast, fast, FAST plain text files, and then get typesetting-quality out, LaTeX can't be beat.
Toon toon! Black and white army!
...That's ironic, because Nirvana actually was by Microsoft 13 years ago, since they're both from the Seattle area.
or do you just hate the paper clip?
LETS DECOMPOSE & ENJOY ASSEMBLING
I'm using Word 5.1a most of the time today. Tables, margins, styles all work better than in Word v.X IMHO.
One key is to find the Microsoft translators so you can open documents created in more recent versions of Word.
The only limitation that affects me is modern graphic formats are not supported; for these I have to have Word v.X
On the other hand, PowerPoint has improved a lot; I bought Office v.X to get the new PowerPoint.
-- Sally
for these old wordprocessors. word 5.1 ?
I have to use MS Word at work but I use WordPerfect 11 at home when I need to get real work done. WP lets me format a document the way I want to as opposed to Word where you have to do what Word thinks is best. If ever I have a problem with formatting in WP I just open Reveal Codes and fix it as opposed to spending an hour fighting with Word. Lots of other bonuses now in WP such as the built in dictionary and publish to pdf. Too bad that Corel let Paul Allen and Vector steal the company last year. There is no way now that they will ever sell the company to someone who could really threaten MS Word's monopoly.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
I went to college in fall 1991, to a school that required Macs. At the time, System 7 was just coming out, and the cheapest (recommended) machine to students was the Mac Classic, with 2 MB of ram. Thankfully, I was able to get a Mac IIsi at the time (for $3000), but it turned out that 2MB wasn't enough to run System 7 and Word 5 at the same time. Most students actually preferred Word 4 at the time (install took up 3 floppies instead of 5) and actually declined the free upgrade we were offered, because their machines wouldn't support it. The college finally offered free upgrades to 4 mb ram for the Classic, but at the time we all thought word 5 was big and bloated. (This was version 5.0). As always YMMV.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
CfkRAp1041vYQVbFY1aIwA== RV/hBCLKKcSTP5UFK3kqsg==
the standard anywhere where the users want a full controll of the page formating
I have had to use and support versions of WP from 5.1 (dos) to the 2000 windows and no MS Word product would give us the usability and formating capabilities that WP has.
Ask around any Law , Accounting and etc office that needs to rely on standard formating for documents is still using WP as the main stay of word processing
I always preferred WordPerfect 5.1. If you need a more then capable yet amazingly functional and easy to use word processor look no further then WordPerfect 5.1. WP51 in my opinion is still king of the word processors.
WN was also specifically optimized for the pre-PPC chip, and its speed advantage wasn't as amazing when that change happened. Emulated it was okay, but not wow! great. Still a lean, purpose-driven little WP, but it wasn't the quickest-feeling-WP-ever any more.
I dunno, though, whether WriteNow was Word's equal with stuff like Mail Merge and tables. Those two features, in Word 5.1a-era when you still had real rulers to tell you where your table was on the page and so on, would have been a strong argument for Word for a lot of admins.
(The article's completely right that Word, post-5.1a, was the start of change for its own sake in the Office line. WriteNow never committed that sin against its users -- and never got to sell all the subsequent revs as a result. Goodbye, WriteNow.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
It takes considerable more time to learn (La)TeX than a wordprocessor, but the results are well worth it if you want publication quality print. PC wordprocessors are the logical evolution of typewriters, TeX (and Framemaker, InDesign, Quark, etc.) is an evolution of typesetting.
Typesetting was/is a separate skill from writing. In the old days, an author would type or write a manuscript and send it to the publisher, who had professionals to design and typeset the results. Nobody would think of publishing the output of their typewriters, since it looked awful. That's also how the original PC wordprocessors were used: to type manuscripts, letters and memos. A lot of authors seem to think that they are also typesetters, writing whole books in Word, thinking it is ready for publication.
One of the most obvious indications of the heritage of wordprocessors is the Underline toolbutton alongside Bold and Italic. Traditionally, underline almost never appeared in print. Typewriters, however, used them extensively since they had no Italic.
...an abandonware challenge for the ever-resourceful Slashdot crowd. I'm sure that major mod-points await someone who can post a link to a download of Word 5.1 (preferably one that runs on Windows). :)
Windows XP Service Pack 1 version 5.1.2600.1106
For people who can't handle \LaTeX
Yes and no. I love LaTeX but I really can't justify using it. I do contract work for the government and have to supply them with reports and briefings (my research is my "product"). The contracts are now specifying that the reports must be in Microsoft Word and the briefings in Powerpoint. I used to give out PDFs because I didn't like the idea of people cut-and-pasting from my work. Or -- worse yet -- changing parts of my documents or getting access to the notorious, hidden 'metadata' in Microsoft Office products. But I really don't have a choice anymore -- I MUST supply my work in Microsoft-propritary format. So LaTeX is out for me.
It's really depressing that the government is requiring me to use Microsoft products when the government found that some company guilty of using illegal monopoly powers. It's just another instance of one hand of the government not knowing (or caring, to be more accurate) what the others are doing.
Instead of laughing or sneering at those of us who are using Microsoft products instead of LaTeX, please consider pitying us instead.
GMD
watch this
I was doing such things back in 1989.
Word had right-align tabs. You could set a line left-aligned, and set a single right-align tab at the far right.
Then you type the title name.
done.
I used to use Ami Pro 3+. Everything I did at the time I do now with Word 2002. It was smaller, faster and didn't hassle me with all of the highlighting: auto-correct, grammer, etc.
I find auto-correct and grammer hightlighting annoying because I'm a perfectionist and need to correct the problem immediately. It interrupts my thought process so that I don't always get all of my ideas written.
I now do spell check and grammer checks later in the cycle.
It was a DOS based word processing and database solution that 'just worked' (tm) in a way that to my knowledge hasn't been achieved in any software product since.
The weirdest thing was, for its time, F&A was quite advanced and worked pretty well both, for power users (it had a neat dbase plugin, IIRC) and total newbies.
And what was even more impressive (this was in like 1993 before there were college classes on UI design) it was intuitive in the true sense of the word. You showed people how to get started and they usually managed to figure stuff out from there. IIRC, Symantec abandoned it in 1995-1996. Damn, I really need to get myself a 5.25" drive and hope those discs I got lying around here somewhere still work...
Oh my, this is spooky.... I just ran across floppies for (quoting the disk:)
Microsoft Word
Word Processing Program
for IBM(r) Personal Computers and Compatibles and
for the IBM Personal System/2(tm) Series.
Not a version number in sight (excepting the specified DOS 3.1 requirement)
-xski
(who still has a functioning 5.25 floppy disk installed.)
I still use DOS WP5.1 to this day. It's no longer my main word processor, that's Open Office Writer. The most recent job I've enlisted WP5.1 in is converting old DOS text files intio word processor files with carriage returns on at the end of paragraphs and other little details that modern word processors seem incapable of doing with old text files. It has one of the best scripting systems I've ever played with.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I'm actually doing all my word processing in Textedit now.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
First - Innovation and features are great in software, don't get me wrong, but why does Word have so many features that the office suite takes up 500 MB of hard drive space? Is it lazy code? or just insanely complex tasks? 5.1 fit on a few floppy discs and ran on my Mac SE with a better responsiveness than office 04 has. Boot times were less or equivalent.
Secondly - why do people ask MS to provide features that are better done by a seperate application? Do you really need massive page layout tools in word? Do you really need HTML editing in Word? etc. A word processor should be a word processor. 5.1 was that. 2004 seems to be that uber kitchen utensil that if you order in the next 10 minutes, you'll get a second one for FREE!
Third - And what is the intent of a small, cheeky paperclip guy popping up everytime I'm trying to do something and say "hey!" It's almost like the guy in the cubicle down the way that I just PRAY does not stop by my desk on the way to lunch or the bathroom or just because he needed a quick stretch, but he always does.
How does paperclip guy aid in usability of the product? Is there a better way to let new users (e.g. non geek, barely can turn on the computer kind of people) know about features without driving the world mad?
Any solutions? Or am I in a pipe dream of efficent, small apps that do things really well and don't try to be everything to everyone?
// john athayde
# x@boboroshi.com
# http://www.boboroshi.com/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/vigor/
You can do this with most word processors, by using tabs. What you do is set a tab on the right side of the page, then modify it to be a right-aligned tab. When you tab over to it, your text will be right-aligned to the tab line. This works both in OpenOffice and Microsoft Word.
MS website.
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
Once you have crafted a perfect product that most of the market is now using how to you generate more sales? For software engineers can perfection be to good?
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
"Mac Word 6.0 was a crappy product," admitted Microsoft Mac programmer Rick Schaut on his blog. "And we spent some time trying to figure out how not to do that again."
so, does anyone know where the blogs are for the XP programmers?
There certainly was a Word 4. It was on the Macintosh - my vote for perfect word processing would go to a System 6-based Mac running Word 4.2. Now there was a lean machine.
5.1 under System 7 felt slow in comparison, but did have one extra thing - envelope printing. If it wasn't for that, I'd have stuck with 4.2.
Cheers,
Ian
Hmm, Wordperfect 5.1, Word 5.1, Dolby 5.1
This article is about Word for Mac. Then the comments talk about Office XP. Did the submitter even read the article?
Fast load time, support for basic Word DOC formatting and a few other nice features.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
One of the things that I have been wanting is a console based word processor (I like GUIs but I prefer the command line). Editors like Vim do line wraps but they often have problems if you go back and add words to a previously wrapped line. Emacs does wrap pretty well but you end up with words split in half between two lines.
Is the anything like WordPerfect for DOS for the console?
I remember several years ago I was writing a manual for a software product using Word - back when Word was the "big thang" and people were moving from WordPerfect en masse. I kept running into problems getting this 100-page manual to properly generate table of contents and indices. I finally called up Microsoft tech support and they suggested I break the document into separate smaller files. Their system couldn't properly handle a document that large! Of course, nowhere in the manual did it say there were any limitations of this nature. This was particularly annoying because that's one thing you didn't typically have to worry about with WordPerfect. It seemed to handle large documents as well as small ones.
If there's a word processor I miss, and this might sound goofy, but I really liked Leading Edge Word Processor. I used to install this on client PCs when I did consulting. It was a very innovative product at the time. It's a shame it was abandoned.
Nowadays, I use word, but I've never particularly been fond of it. The user interface has never been very intuitive. But Microsoft has basically destroyed competition in this area so we don't have the choices we used to.
vi, or emacs, for that matter.
Me, I just swear.
Geek 1: EMACS!
Geek 2: VI!
Geek 1: EMACS!
Geek 2: VI!
Geek 3: Oohh Word 5.1!
*Geek 1 and Geek 2 give the look of death to Geek 3. Large heavy objects suddenly get propelled at Geek 3.*
Geek 1: EMACS!
Geek 2: VI!
Geek 3: Vi'macs.... *WHUMP as he passes out from a concusion*
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
In this land of *nix fanatics, I would have expected far more limited commentary. My expectation was for every 3rd post to be devoted to bashing MS, with those between espousing the user's personal preference for emacs, pico, vi, or "other". I was more than a little surprised to see that, for once, people don't have anything (or at least, comparatively little) bad to say about a MS product.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
This should send a message to all open source developers that feature bloat is not at all an indicator of better software. It is best to have a right, balanced set of features with well chosen defaults and, only when possible, easy extensibility.
And configurability is NOT a good thing to have in software; interaction should be designed according to cognitive principles. When the interface is designed to assist the human mental resources, it is easier and better to retrain that to configure the interface to old habits. Hear, KDE?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Perhaps the best *truly* integrated office suites ever developed, for the same reasons stated above: It was quick, wasnt overbloated with useless features, worked well...
:)
It was rather expensive tho...
Not sure about its current state, other that it still is in production, and still too expensive
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In DOS, Word Perfect 5.1.
In OS/2, Describe
In Windows, AmiPro 2.0 or was it 2.1. Can't remember.
On Mac, still waiting. Just got Office 2004 for it. Mainly for my wife. I would prefer a native version of OpenOffice, but I can always run it with X from my Linux box.
I sometimes use WordPerfect 3.5 for Mac when I get tired of Word. It is free for public download, so you don't have to worry about breaking the law. http://acmfiles.csusb.edu/corel/wpmac.html
see subject
Right on!
I didn't figure out how wonderful TeX was until halfway through school... It has a bit of a learning curve when compared to Word/WordPerfect/etc, but the net result is getting beautifully formatted, professional-looking documents in both print and digital. Word processors are great for writing memos and stuff like that, but TeX blows them out of the water in any technical document.
The only problem with TeX is that after writing hundreds of documents with it, I'm still learning it - and I'll always be learning it. That's why the average person doesn't want to touch it... or know what it even is.
-agent oranje.
There seems to be a lot of confusion here between WordPerfect (WP) and Microsoft Word. I never thought I'd see the day when a good product was so often mistaken for a bad one. So here's the breakdown:
:)
WordPerfect is a word processor made (at the time) by the WordPerfect Corporation (it's currently owned by Corel if memory serves, previously owned by Borland too). WP v5.1 For DOS is widely considered to be the best version ever made, and for good reason - it is simply impossible to find a more stable, more functional, or more useful word processor, even today (excluding, of course, newer version file compatibility and support for graphics formats like PNG). WP offered total and complete control over formatting, and when you pressed F11 to show the Reveal Codes window, It Was Good (TM). I would never have learned HTML as quickly as I did back in the day if I hadn't been a longtime user of WP already! 9 out of 10! Woohoo!!!
Word is a word processor by Microsoft. The sole reason it's popular is.... actually, I don't know. It's HUGE for one thing. Bloated, slow on my 2GHz/1GB box, and loaded with crap that shouldn't be in a word processor. If you mess up your formatting, you can literally spend an hour trying to find out where (by comparison, WP would let you fix things like that in a matter of seconds or minutes). The Office Assistant was a good idea, but anyone over the age of 6 finds it condescending and annoying - and this would (I assume) translate into at least 99% of Word's market, so I'm not sure how that lippy little bastard even made it out the door...
Anyhow, please don't confuse WP with Word. They are very seperate products (well, less so these days, since all the WPs since v6 have been trying to compete with Word on Microsoft's terms instead of growing a ball and setting it's own terms) from very different companies. The WP Corporation is now defunct, so there's no way to tell, but I'd love to see what v10 would've looked like if they had written it instead of Corel or Borland
Dammit, I meant to post that anonymously!
Does anyone have a screenshot or something so I can see what all the fuss is about? I've only ever really used Office 2000.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
On the Commodore 128 GEOS was usable and geoWrite was pretty good. If you needed more features, geoPublish was a decent DTP package, considering what it was running on....
But the only way you can, with some plausibility, claim that a product is "improved" is by adding new features. Maybe they're features that some small subset of users might conceivably want, but since this is mature software, all the important features are already present. By adding new non-essential features, you make the interface more complex, the product more difficult to learn and use, and introduce new bugs. (Which can be fixed in the next "improved" version.)
As a result, all the most common applications have grown bloated to the point where they are nearly unusable. Some examples of this are word processors (MS Word), image manipulation software (Photoshop), and CD burning software.
The other day, I wanted to burn a CD. I just wanted to put some photos on the darn thing and give it to my daughter. Turned out that my last CD software was locked to work only with the drive it came with, and the new (ultra cheap OEM) CD/DVD drive I bought didn't come with software. So I looked around for a package that would do what I wanted: burn a CD. I found packages that cost over $60 (Roxio and Nero), claimed to do everything but massage my gluteus maximus, and got horrible user reviews. Indeed, lots of people said that the previous releases of both these packages were better than the new "improved" version! --But of course, the previous release was no longer to be had. I finally found a place on the web that sells old software, and got an early OEM copy of Nero for $5 or so. Works great--it puts stuff on CDs.
Word processors are the worst of the lot, I think. I once used an early version of Word that ran under DOS and that did everything I wanted--in fact, I used it in my job: tech writing. That version of Word (whatever it was) didn't need more features--it just needed cleaning up. (Better interface, more intuitive use of stylesheets--ditch the concept of style inheritance.)
Remember MacWrite? It was a Word processor that you could give your 8 year old, with the reasonable expectation that she would be up and running with it in a few hours. Yeah, MacWrite could have used one or two features--such as the notion of paragraph formatting, page templates and a style catalog, but it was beautifully simple and did what it was supposed to do.
I've fantasized about the notion of starting a company that produces simple software--simple useable versions of the applications that drive everyone nuts. But I quickly realized why that can't be done: if you make simple software, then you'll get sued, since everything that's useful and simple has been patented.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
nano and lpr ... who needs more?
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Yeah... not so much.
You see, the problem is that TeX is a completely closed system. Ironic, no?
TeX has no support for styles, no support for RTF, no support for tagged text, no support for anything that's interoperable with existing authoring systems. If you want to take an authored document and typeset it with TeX, you're just going to have to do it all manually, by god.
Contrast this with, for example, a system like InCopy which can import anything. InCopy can even import Word documents. All you have to do is override Word styles with InCopy styles and poof! Your document is typeset.
Can't do that with TeX.
If you want to start in TeX and finish in TeX and never, ever go into or out of that system, then rock on. But if you ever want to interoperate with anything else, forget it.
I write in my journal
It makes me thing why anyone uses Word or any other WYSIWYG word processing software. They all suck. One has to constantly wonder and tell the software how to layout stuff. LaTeX solved that problem ages ago.
Word? Ack! Pfft!! Gimme Scripsit on a TRS-80.
Does this mean that Word 5.1 was the last release of Word/Mac where MS was actually competing with other Mac word processors?
From 6.0 upward, was Word/Mac's selling point by-ghod compatibility with Word/Windows, which was judged more important than competing on merit (performance or features) in the Mac market?
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I remember using Word 5.1 on a daily basis when I interned at the Ohio House of Representatives. It was truly brain-dead easy to use, simple, streamlined and elegant. If I were one of the smaller, Mac-only word processor vendors (Mellel, Mariner Write, Nisus) I would target the Word 5.1 feature set and look-and-feel as a goal to meet. I've tried all of the above, and while quite good, they all missed the target one way or the other by missing basic features, or missing the mark with simplicity or workflow. I think MS, and OpenOffice are to far gone in the bloaty slow space to ever return a word processor that rivals Word 5.1.
This article is proof enough that Word 5.1 should be their target. If you build it, they will come.
Did anybody else out there like WordPerfect for the Mac? That was my second-favorite word processor ever.
I'm still using Eudora Lite 3.05 from the same era on my Windows machine running XP and it does just fine for every e-mail need that I've got. Text only, no "previews" no MS vulnerabilities. KISS principle still works for me.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Typesetting was/is a separate skill from writing. In the old days, an author would type or write a manuscript and send it to the publisher, who had professionals to design and typeset the results.
In professional publishing, that's the way it still works. Authors and editors use word processors -- only at the very last stage does a "typesetter" do the TeX markup or whatever.
I guess in scientific publishing, authors are expected to use TeX themselves, which seems like a ridiclous workflow.
I used to hear people say things like "Track Changes?!? Nobody would ever use that!"
Well, if you need to send documents around for review, Track Changes absolutely ROCKS. If you write technical documentation, it's foolish not to use it (yeah, I know, I used to think that too; just try it and see ...).
So this leads me to believe that all kinds of stuff I scratch my head at (when I see it in the menus) is making somebody else's day go much easier that it otherwise would. Just because I don't use it doesn't mean that it is bloat.
I agree, why does MS think I want a separate window, bar, or pop up for every action performed on a document. I have spent more time with Office XP hacking the registry and customizing toolbar buttons to avoid their suppossed intelligent features.
Next their going to introduce different degrees of italics and bold.
You have selected bold. How bold would you like it today? Please adjust the thickness, shade and sharpness sliders below
For Christ sakes just give me a solid word processor with out the needless tweaks.
I've used MS Publisher ever since 1997, and I've always loved it. Publisher lets me lay out the page the way I want it, whereas formatting is often a struggle with Word.
I wonder why Publisher and Word are still seperate products, seeing how Publisher could trivially be improved to become a great Word proccessor in addition to a DTP package.
There is a type in the article. "swear by" needs to be updated to "swear at"
I truly doubt that just this caused the death of Netscape. Maybe it was the fact that IE came bundled with the OS and could do everything that Netscape could do. Good enough and already in their face, this lead to the "normals" just sticking with IE - why bother installing anything extra?
That is one dubious recommendation there.
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
You guys are MISSING THE POINT.
Which is easier, inserting a flush right code, or setting a bloody right aligned tab?
I use OO now, mostly because Wordperfect 9 for linux apparently needs linux from a few years ago to run properly. But, I can't for instance, get OO for linux to print an envelope to save my life. I'm thinking about going back to WP 8 for linux, if I can find it again.
I used to use Word 5.1 on a Mac Classic II back in the day. It. Just. Worked. I wrote my thesis on that box and with 5.1.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
that reminds me that debian's latest stable release was released 13 years ago.
facts: word is not dying, debian is dying
when Microsoft started to implement Office products using COM circa 1994. Granted, the idea of the Automation gave users tremendous power. But, the flipside reveals a plethora of macro virii and worms that makes my head spin. For me, I would prefer simplicity over power.
Coderz 4 Life
If you want office without all the bloat just use open office its free!
Old versions of Word are certainly not nearly on the same level as WordPerfect goes. IMHO WP was just always a step ahead. You'll find lots of old WP running out there still to this day. Most Word users kept upgrading their office suite year after year. That or their versions of Word were upgraded when they bought new PCs. When 95% of computers sold come with either MS Works or MS Office SBE both of which contain new versions of Word it pretty dam hard Not to upgrade.
I gotta say when I the submission and kept thinking they were talking about WordPerfect and had made a mistake. I guess there are old Word users out there but its much more rare to see as opposed to old WordPerfect installs.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
when I first went to college, we had a SCO box that everyone telneted in to. we had tin and elm for email and news, and wordperfect 5.x for word processing. I do a tremendous ammount of work from the console and would *REALLY* like to know if there's a way to provide the same functionality for Linux, short of running an emulator?
Anyone know?
-C
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
What kind of Microsoft sponsored tripe is that.
The only real thing is of course LaTeX. It used to be fun to watch when people lost their Masters Thesis due to some silly bug related to reformatting under Word.
Nowadays the thing has become more stable, so no more "I told you so". Whats left is only to point out that the result looks much more professional with LaTeX.
Gee, nerds who use WinWord, they don't make them as they used to.
I treat my Mac Word 5.1 diskettes like a fine museum piece. I still use the program after all these years. Its run on a SE, IIci, Quadra 800, PMac 8100, PMac 9500, and most recently on the wife's G4 Pbook and OSX. Never misses a beat.
In college I became addicted to Borland's Sprint on the PC (and to a lesser extent Note Bene). I still have not found better on the PC side, and a regularly hit Borland's site to check to see if they have released sprint to the public domain.
I don't word-process very much, but for Mac users there is one great option available for "I just want to write" types: Mellel. It's got tables, styles, footnotes/endnotes, and multilingual support -- all the power features "normal people" use in Word and none of the chrome. All for under thirty bucks, which is a darned good value and (I'm sure) an improvement on Word 5.1 by any measure.
No self-respecting geeks admits they use anything other than vi.
Next their going to introduce different degrees of italics and bold.
Perhaps you wouldn't object if "highlight spelling errors in document" defaults to True?
In professional publishing, that's the way it still works. Authors and editors use word processors -- only at the very last stage does a "typesetter" do the TeX markup or whatever.
And they use underline for highlighting.
Forget word. Forget WYSIWYG word processing. Forget bloated files. Forget macro viruses. Forget documents that crumbles into ill-formatted pieces when you open them on a different computer. Embrace the power of LaTeX. Write your documents on whatever text editor you please. Once you switch, you'll never have anything but pity for the rest of the pack...
Netscape 4.x was ASS. It was okay, but unacceptably buggy and slow. What makes you think 5 was going to be any improvement? I'm assuming that they were still basing it on the original codebase (from version 1). They needed that new layout engine BADLY.
Gecko ran circles around 4.x in rendering, none of that O(N^2) wait blowup if you picked the wrong nesting of tags.
Everyone would have hated 5 just as much as 4... they would still switch to IE.
It's sad, but I'm glad Netscape didn't try for a 5 before they switched codebases. I was like: stick a fork in it, it's done.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
MS Works on Windows 3.1.1 was my personal document program of choice in the PC world. Of course, Claris Works on the Mac kicked its ass by leaps and bounds, but I only had access to that at school.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Because in *nix, most every editor out there has a way to use ispell or aspell to check your document.
You can also run ispell/aspell on text document outside the editor... it has interactive search/replace.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I always thought that WP5.1 was the first truly usable word processor, and every thing else has been a clone. In the case of M$: a clone with a bloat problem.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
It ran like a champ on my 33mhz PowerBook 190.
Now, someone remind me what the system requirements are for the current versions of Office and Open Office?
Try living somewhere (3rd world country) where your local university doesn't know better and forces you to write your thesis in Word. I will get gray hairs after i get corrected all the alignment issues after migrating from LyX.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Word 5.1 for Mac was great. WP-5.1 for anything was great. RedHat 5.1 was great.
5.1 must be the sweet spot.
Why would anyone want more than Zardax on an Apple ][? Does anyone else remember this? It was from Australia, used embedded commands much like Wordstar.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
I've used Word 2000 for quite a while now. I really don't like it a whole lot. I really cannot think of anything that Word excels at. I guess having the red and green squiggly lines is useful for letting you know something's up. But.. man, that's all I can think of. For me, auto-correction was eating up more productivity than it was adding. Don't even THINK about trying to do any form of layout. Forget it. Get Publisher or PageMaker or something. Man, it's like trying to assemble a house using a deck of cards. One wrong move and BLAMMO. Start over and do it RIGHT this time. I guess my real issue with Word is that using it is like driving through a parking lot loaded with speed bumps. Vroooom..screech...vroooooooom...screeech.
Wanna know what's sad? I've actually gotten into Office. I've scratched fairly deep into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Frontpage etc. I'm exactly the right type of person to make good use of it... and well I can't. If that doesn't give you a good idea of what a piece of crap Word is for anything but the most basic of functions, then I don't know what would.
"Derp de derp."
I don't know if anyone else remembers Professional Write (PFS Write) It came bundled with a few other apps. Best word processor I've ever used!
Required reading for internet skeptics
But whenever I need to provide a document
to describe or provide a user-guide,
rather than asking "how should this be made?",
I simply write it (using Emacs!) in LaTeX,
and use a Makefile, with rules to produces:
PostScript, (latex->dvips->)
PDF (pdflatex)
html (latex2html)
Did you script the changes you made so the next time, because there's always a next time especially with Windows, you don't have to do it all by hand?
A simle WSH script to automate those registry changes might save you a bunch of time and headachs next time around.
"It's been all downhill from there..."!
And didn't they introduce the Windows "registry" shortly thereafter, just to rub the point in?! And isn't this the only valid reason why the "installing" of an application is any more than a simple file copy?!
I still have an old Windows 3.1 application which I "installed" on my present computer by just such a simple file copy. It ran immediately without a hitch and is just as fast as or faster than current applications.
"Microsoft progress" is just as bad a joke as "Microsoft innovation"!
Isn't it "amazing" that "Microsoft progress" and "Microsoft innovation" now seem to only benefit Microsoft?
"Their" in the sentence you quoted is spelled correctly, and would therefore not be highlighted. Dumbass.
> MS Word jumped from like 2.0 to 5.1 to "catch up" with Wordperfect.
I'm sure this was intended as a joke, but it's actually correct with one slight correction.
After shipping Win Word 2.0 and Mac Word 5.1, the two teams and code bases were merged to build one product that worked on both platforms. While the Windows version of Word was only at version 2.0, it had been in development for eons, dating back before Mac Word 3.0. The Windows version had suffered significant changes in the Windows platform (it was started before Windows 3.0, if you have any idea what that means), as well as an overly ambitious feature set. Along the way, they integrated all of the great stuff from the Mac version, like tables and page view, both innovative in their time. When Win Word 1.0 came out, it had everything that Mac Word 4.0 had, plus lots of other stuff, most significantly a macro language and fields (which do automated numbering, math equations, forms, etc).
Mac Word 5.0 and Win Word 2.0 were upgrades to those code bases: smaller releases to add a few features, respond to customer requests, and put some polish on the preceding versions. After that, the two teams and code bases were merged into one colossal effort to build a version of Word that ran on both platforms, supported the same core set of features (plus platform-specific features like DDE on Windows and Publish and Subscribe on Mac), and used the same file format. (Actually, there were two such efforts, the first got cancelled, but that's another story.) While most of the team worked on the big merge effort, smaller teams produced incremental updates for the Win and Mac versions, thus Mac Word 5.1.
As this huge project got closer to shipping, the marketing folks had to decide what to call it. Should it be Word 3.0 because there were more Windows customers than Mac customers? Or should it be Word 6.0 because that was the larger number and there had already been a Mac Word 3.0? Adding to the issue, Mac Word wasn't very well received since it shipped about a month too early and had significant bugs. Version 3.1 was a much better product, but the press continued to gripe about it for years.
The decision was finally made by the product manager after talking to someone from the press who asked, "why would I want to by Word 3 when I can buy WordPerfect 5?" This clown was serious, and since idiots from the press play a huge role in forming customers' impression of products, the decision was made to pander to the dorks who think the merits of a product can be summed up in a single-digit version number. This amp goes to eleven.
So the first release of the cross-platform version of Word was called version 6.0 because Microsoft had good reason to fear that reviewers would look at the version numbers for WordPerfect and Word and conclude that since 5 is greater than 3, WordPerfect must be better so that should be the conclusion of the review.
I used to work in a unix shop ('bout 20 years ago, which is before Linux. I used nroff and roff to write documents (which is sorta like Tex). Reminds me of HTML actually, the way you have to insert commands to do formating. Got the job done, but we didn't have a print preview, so I wasted a LOT of paper getting it right!
Absolutely. And if for some reason you can't or won't use LaTeX, WP5.1 is a good choice ... I remember when WP5.1 first came out, I thought it was bloatware, but I now know that compared to M$ Word 95 which I'm forced to use on the job, WP5.1 is a marvel of efficient programming.
OpenOffice Impress will export a presentation as Flash, so you can play it in any browser. This also allows you to easily put your presentations on web sites for later viewing.
I'm forced to use Word at my company so if I'm just trying to get some text down, I'll do it in notepad first, then copy/paste into word when I'm ready to spellcheck and make it look "pretty".
I just don't trust Word enough to not mess around with what I'm typing.
Even if you count in all the time it takes WinXP to boot, opening an MSOffice word processor document for the first time is faster than opening an OO word processor document for the first time.
I used the DOS version of 5.1 for as long as I could get away with it. Sometimes an applicaton reaches the point where it is as good as it is going to get. Nothing as good since.
Ditto Lotus Magellan and Lotus Agenda, while we're lamenting great DOS apps that died with the OS. Nothing since for any OS does what they did as well as they did.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
That's the only thing I actually care about from Word > 5. I used to hate it, but ... nope, too darn useful.
I'll admit that while doing battle with
Word 2000 and OpenOffice Writer at various points I've been very tempted to install Basislisk and fire up my old copy of Word 5.1 for the Macintosh.
Netscape didn't go belly up because they delayed release of one more version of the browser. They gave the thing away, remember? Still do.
They went belly up because they were everyone's third or fourth choice for web amd server technology.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
As someone else mentioned, the Word 5.1 people are talking about is the Mac version.
However, Word 4.0 for the Mac was way better than Word 5; the problem was that it as attached to technology that was not modern enough. It was designed for System 6 (OS releases were called System [1-7.5]) and it wasn't ready for Truetype (my biggest gripe). It limited fonts to 127 point size.
The thing that made it so great though is that it fit on one freaking floppy! I think it used ~300 K of RAM. You could fit Word 4 and the System 6 OS on one floppy and boot from it (800K floppies I think, not 1.4 MB "HD" floppies. Macs didn't have 720K floppies). You could then keep the floppy ejected, and put in the floppy that you save your documents on. Accordingly, the software ran freaking fast. There was another floppy but I can't remember what it had; it was probably the spelling dictionary. Someone else mentioned the speed of WriteNow. WriteNow was written entirely in Motorola 68k assembly language. They got screwed on the move to PPC. I used to laugh at idiots who advocated writing Palm entirely programs in 68k asm, and I was right :) Computers only get faster...
It did everything I needed Word 5 to do (which is a LOT), and it had a much stronger document formatting model; before Microsoft hacked things like Text Boxes onto the design. It was a lean, mean, long-document writing machine. It didn't include a shit-load of shitty clip-art, a shitty graphics editor, etc. I'm sure Word 5 can do this, but Word 4 also let you include raw Postscript code in your documents to send to the printer. The manual (software came with excellent manuals back then) demonstrated what you could do with Postscript. Macs + Desktop Publishing + Networking + Postscript Printers were standard fare in those days. Speaking of the manual, it was written entirely and formatted (page design, including sidebar captions and diagrams, table of contents, and an index too I think) using Word 4. Word isn't meant to do a project that large anymore. Word 4 would actually keep only parts of the document you were working on in memory, so you could use it on a machine with 512k of RAM. It was the anti-thesis of bloatware. That's why I liked Microsoft back then; it was well engineered software.
When Word 5 came out, it came in about 10 floppies I think, with an installer that extracted it from compressed files. It also had toolbars that took up precious screen space, when a lot of Macs were 512x384 (that's the resolution of my first Mac LC; I think the normal 9" Macs' resolution was a bit shorter). Someone sent a joke screenshot to Macworld that was a mock-up of Word 10, to be released in 2000 or so (IIRC). It was to be installed from 100 floppies and all the toolbars took up 75% of the screen space. The sad part is, Word 6 (which came on a CD) did just that!
I remember some industry pundits (and some not-so pundits but just informed people) saying that MS developed their GUI-writing expertise on the Mac, and then used that to bring full-featured applications to Windows when it was ready. For example, Microsoft Excel 1.0 was created for the Mac (~1986). I don't know when the first Windows version came out, but it would have been some time later.
I also used Word 5 for DOS on a 286 before I got a Mac. It was very, very nice, for a text-based interface. But I was blown away when I bought a Mac and Word 4 for it. I actually bought Word 4 back then (MS wasn't as obviously evil as they are now; I actually liked them back then and the great software of theirs that I had the chance to use, like Word), and it was worth every penny. I got pissed when Word 5 was released 6 months later that addressed the pains I had using Word 4 on System 7, so I thought I'd hold out for Word 6. What a mistake that was :P
MS actually sold a downgrade for Word 6 customers. You could buy the POS Word 6, and pay more to downgrade to Word 5. I'm not making this up.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
I hate when word suggests grammatical changes when there are no.
Non-System foot or foot error. remove from mouth and strike any key when ready
I have Word Perfect 8 running on Fedora Core 2. It was free when you registered it. The registration for Word Perfect 8 is long over. It also checks your spelling and grammer too. A great companion to Open Office.
Heh! I still use XyWrite 4 for some things!
At the time of Word 5.1, I remember using Wordperfect, and the nice feature about that was "Reveal Codes" which let you look at an XML-type rendering of what the formatting was. Why doesn't current Word or OpenOffice.org have this type of feature? I think it might be possible with OO.org, but I really don't believe the same about Word...
I was part of a certain center's major OS 9 to OS 10 upgrade, and Word 5.1 is still used by many people at the center (most of them have been here since dirt was first invented). Turns out that it has (according to them) the best mathematical formula display and editor. I personally did some testing with Word 5.1 for one of them on OS X in classic mode, and with the exception of a couple of font display problems that were fixed, it worked perfectly STILL. Sick, but nice that this person we upgraded doesn't have to rewrite millions of pages of documentation on flight characteristics and such of various aircraft/spacecraft and whatever else she had. Just sad that something as simple as that equation editor isn't in current releases.
This is not the signature you are looking for...
Yeah, if you can make Word 5.1 (which is a Mac-only product) run on Windows, I'll give you more than just mod points...
What about one of the many old-school Mac emulators for Windows?
I run these occasionally and it still gives me a kick to see the happy mac face pop up in a window as OS7/8 loads. I hear there are even OS.9 emulators, but I've never personally seen one running.
Da Blog
I once worked with a graphic designer and whenever he needed to create a letter or invoice he opened Free Hand and used the programs type features. For him, it probably was faster... and I must say, every letter out of his dye-sub printer looked perfect.
Say hello to my little sig.
--pete
every version of WordPerfect since 8.0 has s*&^ed
:)
I'm sorry, but did you just censor the word SUCKED? Sorry, just find that amusing...
Joseph?
Every time this topic comes up you see posts stating "most law firms still use Wordperfect 'cause it's the best for legal work"
Reality check time folks. Wordperfect may have some good legal-specific features but here's the results of last years' LawNet Technology Survey in answer to the question: "What is your firms' Primary Word Processor?"
Word:
2001: 70%
2002: 79%
2003: 86%
WordPerfect:
2001: 30%
2002: 20%
2003: 13%
As you can see, the use for Wordperfect is dying out at law firms as fast as anywhere else and has been for some time.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Your statement is so unbelievably painful to parse and even look at that it could only have been written by Clippy.
WordStar...
I miss it.
LaTeX is the standard, but I don't generally see a required document format for submitting papers to mathematics journals. SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) will accept Word and use word2tex. But I do some refereeing for (mostly) matrix theory and numerical analysis journals and I've never seen a paper written in Word (except for engineering journals). If you have something with a lot of equations LaTeX is a lot less work if you know how to use it. Using the equation editor in word is excruciatingly painful and slow.
I frequently generate LaTeX documents from other formats. Not Word documents, I must admit, but that's really just because I don't have the faintest idea how to interpret those and I don't use Word anyway.
It's hard to go from Word to LaTeX because Word is less structural and more format-oriented, but you could theoretically use some rules to translate from its styles to a pretty plain TeX input file.
The other reason it was so great was because Word/Office 6.0 was so horrible. It was one of the worst programs that I have ever seen. My understanding of the whole thing was that it was a port from the Windows version. So, they did a lot of funky things to not have to rewrite parts of it. It was really bad. I rememeber trying to run it off a central server like they recommended... Scary... And then trying to run it off the local machines in a student computing lab... Not fun..
Which existing authoring systems do you want to interoperate with that have been around longer than / as long as TeX? Shouldn't you be complaining that many authoring systems don't interoperate with TeX?
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I think a lot of people don't realize how much control you can take over Windows using WSH. Maybe most people don't know it exists?
At any rate, I think the original post there was just plain wrong. I'm coming at it from a point of Office 2003 though. I don't think I ever used XP. In 2003 I spent about ten minutes making a custom install script which put all the features how I want them for the entire company and that was that. Its only used for existing machines, new machines are just imaged. I hate reinstalling stuff.has everything you could need, and nothing more.
Still waiting on AbiWord to get ported to Cocoa.....
I have used Mac Word v5.1 almost ever since it came out. After upgrading to Word v6.0 and having my system crash repeatedly, I stopped using it and went back to v5.1. I have never left it since.
I did, when Corel offered me a deal I couldn't refuse, purchase Corel Office for the Mac which had WordPerfect v5.1 in it. I would have to say that for some things WPv5.1 is better than Wv5.1. But in others - it is worse.
I also prefer Canvas v3.54 over WordPerfect, Word, or even PageMaker when it comes to laying out a page. Canvas v3.54 is really a 2D CAD system but you can use it to lay out many different types of pages. It has built in Kerning, as well as many other features which were not found in word processors of the time. (The current version of Canvas is really a combo of PhotoShop and PageMaker. Sort of like a high end PowerPoint program.)
I have also tried MacWrite Plus (crashes system), NisusWriter (good word processor but has its own brand of quirks), MacWrite (Ok - we are going WAY back now!), vi (excellent text editor), emacs (too many macros for me!), Alpha, LaTeX, BBEdit, and many other text editors/Word Processors. Word v5.1 on the Mac can beat them all (except vi and emacs) for ease of use, small footprint, and the ability to use any printer you want. (Remember on the Mac you had the one interface to many printers.)
When I moved from the Mac to the IBM a few years back I found that I really hated having to use the current version of MS-Word. I was always trying to get it to stop correcting what I was typing. (For example - Create an outline using lowercase letters. When you get to "i" MS-Word automatically changes it to "I". How stupid can a word processor be?) Anyway, with my purchase (on eBay) of some slightly faster Macs than what I originally had - I have switched back to Macs somewhat. Instead of using an IBM - I use Virtual PC. So I can now use both Word v5.1 as well as to move it over and incorporate the document into the later version of Word. So I get the best of both worlds now.
The drawbacks to Word v5.1 is that it did not do Kerning, fractional spacing, and antialiased fonts. So sometimes the fonts look jagged. By moving the document, once created, to the later version of Word - these advancements are then included into the document. So long as you do not allow the newer MS-Word program to upgrade the document - you can always go back to using the earlier version. The thing you have to watch out for is that the later versions really try very hard to trick you into writing over the older document. Which, of course, then makes it impossible for you to go back to the older method.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
Did you script the changes you made so the next time, because there's always a next time especially with Windows, you don't have to do it all by hand?
A simle WSH script to automate those registry changes might save you a bunch of time and headachs next time around.
What in the name of mother-fucking-hell are you talking about?
I want to use the freaking thing, not learn how to script and canoodle it through the registry.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
As this poster points out, there are in fact tools to convert e.g. word to LaTeX.
DNA just wants to be free...
I'm telling you what *I* think. Of course the Netscape developers were sure that Netscape 5 was going to fix all Netscape's problems. But nothing there in that interview indicates it would have been a significant departure from 4.x. That would have done nothing to help them, since everyone had already abandoned it for IE 5 (by that time people were already throwing around terms like "Nutscrape").
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Although it was a big pig at the time - almost a whole 800Mb floppy - Fullwright Professional was my favorite of the era. It's outliner alone is a good reason to keep the (now gratis) version loaded.
there's no replacement for displacement
I had a an Acorn Archimedes back in 1991 and it was hard migrating to windows. I had a good word procsessor on it (may have been called 1stWord?) they fitted on floppy disks with plenty of space for my documents on the same disk. Word was nice but I was disappointed in it then and I still am... Openoffice is too bloated, slow to load, I just don't like it. Abiword is slightly better but I still find it bloated why do people insist on having to support .doc format. All I want is spelling good layout, wordpad would do if it had tables. any conversion can be done by a commandline program. I just wish Mozilla would produce a wordprocessor, if they got the css2 print style sheets working properly then I would use composer instead of Abiword. (perhaps it does now I haven't tried for a while...) The HTML format does everything I need a word processor to do.
(other end tied to Redmond).
The make-up dept has already covered over the hole thru his lip where the hook was removed.
gewg_
I can't believe no one has mentioned WordStar yet (I searched the comments even!).
WordStar 6 was by far the best word processor of its day. No moving your hand away from home row. Built-in thesaurus. Good graphical page preview. Control the aspects of your document with "dot commands" that could be easily copied around if you needed.
Image insertion was possible but a pain in the arse.
I work at a newspaper... we use Quark for our page layout. I'd rather we use Adobe Indesign page layout software. Either one is FAR SUPERIOR & MORE MODERN than MS WORD or any other "word processing" program will ever be.
...and if I get another d?mn client built AD in WORD .doc format that some moron who thinks he's a designer cuz he's got a 'puter I'll scream!!
Word processing program should have died with the invention of the mouse...
Say what you will, but I personally find Office 2003 to be an excellent product. Even running on a modest system (PIII 500, 256M PC100, Windows XP), it's pretty peppy.
It hasn't crashed yet on me, it autosaves your work in case of the inevitable (my notebook has no battery and people have a habit of unplugging it), it is loaded with features (many that I find useful), and it's pretty easy to use.
but you knew it was going to take a while anyway... We hung a couple of 3B2s on our network just to crunch troff, and set up an LP queue thingy to feed them. That kept the CPU load managable, and gave you a way to check on your print job's status before walking over to the printer.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If they call themselves a "power user", yes. But I'm a professional programmer, so when I call someone that, I mean that I think they know the app quite well, including less obvious tricks.
Anyway, in this case I used the phrase to mean that indeed it was Word screwing up, not that this was a group of people who were simply misusing it because they could barely find the keyboard with both hands.
I don't suppose there's a term you prefer, to describe people who really know what they're doing with an app?
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Even if Word were the best program around for text editing, I'd still refuse to go near it if I saw Clippy smiling at me. I have nightmares about that damn thing trying to help me. Make it stop! Make it stop!
A problem that occurs in so much software is that there never seems a good place to stop. Word keeps evolving for the sake of evolving, in the process being less well able to do the things it was initially designed for. But the same is true of so much other software: emacs is huge; so it Mozilla. In the latter case people have tried to trim things down, but I won't be surprised if their efforts become huge too. The extra bloat isn't from bugfixes, it's from too many extras.
Another example, going back to wordprocessors. Take Abiword. It has bidirectional printing. I'm never going to use that. It has internationalization. I'm unlikely to write in another language enough to use that either. Of course it's tricky, since I know that other people will want to use these features. But for me they end up wasting space and loading time.
It's all so far from the Unix way of doing simple individual things well. That principle seems to be dying out, but it doesn't seem any less valid now than 10 years ago.
Do you have any advice for my Win2K SP4 machine with 30.1GB free on my 34.4GB NTFS-formatted SATA hard drive?
When I run the setup.exe file, I get this far:
At this point, I get the following error message: Your hard disk does not have enough free space for all the Word files. [...] Delete files or programs to provide an additional 28019 K of disk space and run Setup again.
Hmmm, by my guess, Word 5.5 can't count as high as my free space, and I've probably looped some counter a few times. Sadly, once that counter stopped spinning, I landed on "too little space" instead of "full steam ahead".
Bummer.
It's not too shabby.
Ever use WANG WP? While it had a fairly steep learning curve once I learned where everything was kept I was faster on that than I am on Word these days...
almost a whole 800Mb floppy
BIG Floppy!
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On my machines that little 'feature' is disabled, and OO.o still takes ages longer to boot on a premium modern machine than Office does. There's no comparison, really.
I use OO.o even though the preferences are impossible to navigate; it'd be nice if the OO guys could at least rip off that single aspect of Office. Sigh.
It _is_ fast, so long as you don't give it anything too complicated, or try to resize the screen too much. :-)
It was the best for reading straight HTML docs (like docbook-converted manpages and stuff).
But my machines run Moz fast now... it's a fading memory.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Please, don't forget to tell it's the Mac version. I could guess that in that era 75% of computers were DOS/Windows based.
Word Perfect 5.1 is still a great word processor - once you learn it completely. Especially the key compbiation for the menu, reveal codes, and of course print preview.
I hate Word only after it auto-formats and destroy my beatiful tables, lists and some formatting like colored backgrounds.
looks like you managed to disable the spell-checker too.. ;)
What makes you think Vi'macs is more profecient than Macs'Vi? Hippocrit.
With Word 5.5, they started using the IBM standard for text GUIs, where you have pull-down menus at the top of the screen and some well-known keyboard shortcuts.
Unfortunately, that's also where they introduced all the bugs, while 5.0 and earlier versions had MS's own weird (by todays standards) user interface but were more solid than any later version.
Surely someone else remembers the time when software which included an editor often came with the option to use "Wordstar keys" -- a lot of Borland stuff, for instance?
My personal favourite was WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, but I wouldn't use it now -- it's nvi for me.
Thank you!
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Without a *single* exception, every user, and *esp* every secretary/admin assist/whatever, who knew both swore *by* WordPerfect 5.2. It did everything, and Dirt, er, Word was trying to play catchup. WP was overwhelmingly the word processor of choice, to the point it was written into government contracts that documents be delivered in that format.
And one thing that WP 5.2/6.0 did, that neither Word *not* OpenOffice.dog do, is -F3, reveal *all* codes...so you could *always* make it do what you wanted, not what it thought it knew better how to do than you did.
mark
These kids today with their "features" and "technology". I remember when I was young our video cards supported two colors and we liked it that way. None of this sissy optical stuff for our mouses either, they had balls! I wish I could say the same about all of these kids today with their icons and IDEs, it would do them some good to type a command or two or do some punch card programming...
I have, as a matter of FACT, the installers for MS Word 3.0 and 4.0. They both appeared on the Macintosh. Way before Winword 2.0 for the PC.
This has got to be the dumbest thing I have ever heard in my network security career! Probably even dumber than the self-extracting zip archives. "Oh, you don't have a program to read my text? No problem! Let me send you a native binary executable! By the way, I LOVE YOU. I want you to send your advise." Why am I not surprised this Powerpoint is a Microsoft product? My God... "Pack-and-go" indeed... This foolish idea is profanely insulting in its stupidity.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Mostly because of the cost. I bought an eMac last year, mostly because of how OSX looked, and then there's Panther, which costs enough to cause me to think twice before upgrading (still havent). Then there's the myraid of programs that I have but *shouldn't* (yarrr), like Photoshop, Office v.X, Roxio Toast, etc, etc, these are far too fancy for my needs, and should cost well over the price of my computer. Then theres open source, the Gimp, OpenOffice.org, and _insert cd burning software here_, are above and beyond my needs and *free*, so I dont have to pirate. Which is why I'm selling my Mac, and building a Linux (or possibly FreeBSD)-based i386 PC. The Free-As-In-Beer Software aspect really sold me, and then I'll probably learn to do stuff like modify code later on.
For stability, you needed the 'a' varient.
Then it was totally sweet, ran it on my Mac OS 7.z to 8.x machines (wouldn't run under OS 9.x or later).
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Every version of Office since '97 includes a fulls set of UI code. That way, you can load up Office XP on Windows 98, or Windows XP, and it looks the same. Same goes for Office 2003; it looks the same on Windows 2000 as it does on XP, besides the window decorations provided by XP's "themes."
I do not think that OO is poorly optimized. It might not be AS optimized in the way that Microsoft is able to cheat by modifying the OS to accomodate their own programming staff, but it's certainly fast when it's done loading. There's a few reasons for this.
With MS Office, lots of the libraries that are needed are already included with windows and in many cases are already loaded. With OpenOffice, nothing is provided by the OS, so it has to load everything from disk, and initialize all of it's controls. There's a lot more to load.
I admit, OO could use a little optimization, but not necessarily in the code, but the methods on how it loads up it's configuration and libraries. But the fact of the matter is, no matter how good they make it, it will never load faster then Microsoft's Office on Microsoft's Windows because they design it that way.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I think that was the LAST version of Word for Unix. And yes, believe it or not, there was a version of Word for Unix.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Well, before you decide to sell your Mac, try Yellow Dog Linux on it. It is a Red Hat fork.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
You're obviously a moron, maybe you should go back to using a pen and paper and leave computers to those who have a fucking clue.