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."

Comments

M$ can say Mission Accomplished!

[dpu]

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 :)