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Microsoft Word 5.1: The Apex of Word Processing

Posted by michael on from the when-men-were-men-and-programs-were-scared dept.

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."

33 of 591 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting - 5.1 the magic version number? by Pxtl · · Score: 3, Interesting

    WP peaked at 5.1, Word peaked at 5.1 - any other products for which 5.1 was the magic version number?

    1. Re:Interesting - 5.1 the magic version number? by betelgeuse-4 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Surround sound? I know it's a different context, but many people say they can't hear the difference between 5.1 and the ones with even more speakers. (I'm happy with a decent pair of headphones)

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    2. Re:Interesting - 5.1 the magic version number? by The_K4 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The difference between 5.1 and 7.1 is VERY noticable, especially in the scene where Trinity kicks the Cop's Asses. You can HEAR her run around the walls...... :)

  2. Spell check by JPriest · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The only one feature I use in MS Office or OpenOffice on my home desktop is spell check. The main problem I have with OO.o being slow to start is that I am never using it for longer than 5 seconds. If I had an ASCII gedit or notepad (spellpad) with spell check I wouldn't even need an office suite on my home desktop.

    Sure many people use them for more then that, but you might be suprised how many don't

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  3. WordPerfect 5.1 by www.sorehands.com · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I have a friend, an attorney, who swears by Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS. He runs it in a dos box and uses Ghostscript and redirection to convert to PDFs and fax.

    I prefer the document coding that they switched to with 6 -- splitting the font size from font selection codes.

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    1. Re:WordPerfect 5.1 by kin_korn_karn · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This is common in the legal profession. WordPerfect somehow became the standard there, while Word took over everywhere else.

    2. Re:WordPerfect 5.1 by josquin00 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The legal team for a former employer of mine claimed that WordPerfect has a far better redlining system. If you've worked with a laywer, they live and die by redlining.

    3. Re:WordPerfect 5.1 by angkor · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yes, I still use the macros in WordPerfect 5.1 to manipulate all kinds of text. While not intuitive, once you learned the controls you could write macros as fast as you could think them.
      When they went to WordPerfect 6 it was a Word-like (non-DOS box) like interface and they changed all the key combination shortcuts driving existing users crazy. Eventually they came out with WordPerfect 5.2 which had many of the improvements of 6 (like cutting and pasting between macro windows), but kept the 5.1 interface. I've been looking for 5.2 for years, but can't find a copy to 'update' my nearly 15 year old copy of 5.1!

    4. Re:WordPerfect 5.1 by pknoll · · Score: 2, Interesting
      This is common in the legal profession. WordPerfect somehow became the standard there, while Word took over everywhere else.

      That "somehow" was: WordPerfect deliberately included specific features that were helpful/necessary to the production of legal documents. Word (at the time) didn't.

      WordPerfect also heavily courted the medical industry the same way, but to a lesser degree of success.

  4. Wod Perfect 5.1 by kannibal_klown · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  5. I remember... by Maljin+Jolt · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    There you are, staring at me again.
  6. Best Features of WordPerfect by Verity_Crux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. The $100 downgrade! by John+Harrison · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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  8. WordPerfect 5 by pinkUZI · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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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  9. No starting any flame wars... Wordperfect 8 by KillerCow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 --

  10. Word 4 by hung_himself · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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...)

  11. Wordperfect was so much better. by kinema · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  12. Microsoft format is REQUIRED by gov't by GuyMannDude · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

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  13. Re:Not Just Word by arcmay · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Microsoft has a free Powerpoint viewer available for Windows. It isn't quite small enough to fit on a floppy, but then again, neither are most of the Powerpoint presentations you're likely to come across nowadays. And it does require an install, which is pretty lame. But the point is, you don't NEED to purchase MS Office to view/print Powerpoint presentations. I use it because I don't own office and sometimes I find stuff on the web that I want to read that are only available in Powerpoint. (Google's "View as HTML" link leaves a lot to be desired.)

  14. Re:Word: nice -- if and when... by Planesdragon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    A nice solution: Save as a word HTML file, with all of the little "o" tags left in, then close and re-load it.

    Works surprisingly well, and can even be automated.

  15. Re:It's true by IntlHarvester · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    This might be true, but Word 5.1 was essentially Feature Complete -- there's nothing that you can do in Word 11 that you can't do just as easily in Word 5.1 running on a 2MB Mac Plus. The style and formatting model is basically identical to the modern versions.

    The only real word-processing advances in the product are real-time spell checking/correction and the extemely annoying auto-formatting. (Word5 had auto-correct, but the list wasn't prepopulated like modern versions.) And those are mainly just outgrowths of faster CPUs.

    Of course, there's also a lot of new macro and IPC features, as well as help cartoons and wizards. But for just sitting down and writing, Word 5 had it all.

    (And for the WordPerfect 5.1 fans out there, Word5 ruled for any real formatting beyond monospaced documents with only tabs & margins.)

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  16. Re:Word: nice -- if and when... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    (Posting anon for a reason...)

    I work for a company that has signed the "Embrace and Extend" code visibility agreement. Granted I don't have "clearence" to ALL of the code, what I have seen of Word, your statement SEEMS only kinda true. It's not a "memory dump", I'd call it what looks like a ptrace. It's more only what was the last thing ask for before it dumpped, is what it seems. This SEEMS *NOT* what actually crashed Word, just what the last thing it was able to do. In other words, the info SEEMS meaningless 90% of the time, yet it SEEMS to be stored anyway.

    I brought this up once and I was told that since the company has decided on Word as it's document editor, the "execptions" were considered "normal operation" of the appliction...

    Disclaimer, I'm not a code genious, but, when the last process call SEEMS TO BE the only one recorded...

    Also, I don't think I'm breaking any code release agreements since I have not pasted any code, nor made any specific or exact comments to what the code does. I also do not (currently) work on any OSS projects. Take from this what you will. I put in the disclaimers for a reason.

  17. Re:You could say the same for by Doug+Merritt · · Score: 4, Interesting
    You could say the same [i.e. "swear at"] vi, or emacs, for that matter.

    Naw -- While it's true that I've sworn at emacs because I didn't know how to get it to do something, and I've sworn at vi for not having a feature I wanted, this is rather different than swearing at Word for not doing what you tell it to do.

    Word is buggy. I knew of exactly 1 serious bug in the original vi (it crashed if a global search/replace pattern wrapped around to the next line), none in vim (maybe I've been lucky), and only minor bugs in the various versions of emacs I've used (not counting the less-used infinite add-ons).

    I'm sure that vi and emacs had more bugs than I personally have seen, but my experience is not unusual -- whereas every heavy user of Word becomes keenly aware of its bugs.

    That's a significant difference. Bill Gates has made explicit statements about his beliefs and policies about bugs in his products; I'm not flaming, so I won't quote him directly here, but I really do think that the attitude reflected in those famous comments has a direct impact on products like Word.

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  18. Re:Heck, vi is bloatware! by wideBlueSkies · · Score: 2, Interesting

    >>It's been all downhill from sed if you ask me.

    For me, it's been all downhill after ed .

    Damned bloaded stream editors....

    wbs.

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    Huh?
  19. Re:You could say the same for by TheCrazyFinn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    While that's true for most versions of Word, 5.1 didn't think for you. It's one of the reasons it's so loved by Mac users.

    MS would sell more copies of an OS X port of Word 5.1 than it ever will of Word 2004.

    --
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  20. Microsoft Publisher by Zone-MR · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  21. Re:one man's bloat is another man's feature by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I agree version control is essential, espescially since I work on any of dozens of machines in different buildings.

    Being a mathematician, I write everything from long expositions to simple notes to myself in LaTeX, using CVS for version control. All integrated in emacs, of course.

  22. Microsoft Recent History? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    "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?

  23. Re:LaTeX; Word; WP5.1 by cool_st_elizabeth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  24. Re:You could say the same for by tverbeek · · Score: 3, Interesting
    While that's true for most versions of Word, 5.1 didn't think for you. It's one of the reasons it's so loved by Mac users.

    That, and the fact that it will run on any Mac ever made. OK, I have actually tried it on one of the floppy-only machines, but I found a copy of Word 5.1 on a Mac SE I picked up recently, and it's quite snappy on that li'l 8MHz 2.5MB antique.

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  25. Word 4.0 for Mac ruled. by melatonin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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  26. Re:I used to swear by WP 5.1 until I learned (La)T by Pig+Bodine · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I guess in scientific publishing, authors are expected to use TeX themselves, which seems like a ridiclous workflow.

    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.

  27. Re:You could say the same for by RevAaron · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Most people do not use html to make their documents. Certainly not a simple essay. Definetely not their letter to grandma. ...and there is a reason for this. Not because HTML is too hard, but because HTML blows for print. For my first couple papers in college, I wrote them in HTML in emacs. Guess what? I ended up doing a "print preview" about a zillion times to check my length, check how various figures or tables looked in print, etc etc. HTML sucks for word processing, and anyone who uses it for that does some seriously light writing. Maybe writing that letter to grandma, but anything more any it blows.

    So I did myself a big favor and learned LaTeX. Mm mm good! No more annoying HTML shite and not that hard if you know HTML already.

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