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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."
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.
Just like Netscape jumping from 4 to 6 to match IE6
MS-DOS .. well, I *think* they had a 5.1 .. :)
For people who can't handle \LaTeX
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.
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.
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.
Dude, I still use DBase IV. Sometimes you just have to still with what works.
"Just like Netscape jumping from 4 to 6 to match IE6"
From the Ars Technica interview with Scott Collins:
"We had a 'Netscape 5' that was within weeks of being ready to go, and this person said that we needed to ship something based on Gecko within 6 months instead.....And we didn't get out a 5.0, and that cost of us everything."
Netscape 5 was almost done, but one PHB convinced the other Netscape execs that trashing it and releasing a Gecko-based browser (Netscape 6) would be better.
One more example of how one idiot can trash a whole company. By the time that Netscape 6 was out, all but the die-hards had switched to IE or Opera.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
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.
Hearing is very subjective. If I can't hear the difference between two systems I might as well buy the cheaper one, if you can, then by all means go for the more expensive one. But I shouldn't waste my money on a difference that only you can hear.
Decode these
I've been using word for some years now. It's getting better regarding stability, but it's getting worse in usability. In a vanilla install, I spend just the same amount of time typing as fighting all the inteligent features that crept into new versions.
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.
It is the result of a severely obfuscated binary format. I have heard that part of the format is a memory dump of Word.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
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/
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.
vi, or emacs, for that matter.
Me, I just swear.
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.
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
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 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.
First, the reason for this requirement may be nothing more than pure ignorance.
No, it's interoperability. Which, by the way, is a perfectly valid priority.
They may still not be aware that a word processor's file format is not the right tool for the job.
Rather than assuming that people are ignorant, why don't you consider the possibility that their opinion simply differs from yours? Or, better, what about the possibility that you might be wrong?
Some government agencies specificially prohibit the use of Word and any of its file format for any non-internal electronic communication.
Can you name one?
I write in my journal
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".
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
I disagree that this problem is an inevitable result of growth by accretion. AutoCAD grew the same way and didn't have the problem. The difference is that AutoCAD allows the user better visibility and control of the internal entities (lines, arcs, etc..) than Word does of its entities(presumably paragraphs, keeps, figures ...).
Building a very opaque app that manipulates a complex database may be "user friendly" but it's a recipe for disaster. When you look at a word document on the screen it's hard to know what the underlying representation is.
gedit, assuming you're referring to the GNOME app, has a spellcheck plugin (Edit -> Preferences -> Plugins; F7 to check, also see the Tools menu for autocheck).
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.