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

Interesting - 5.1 the magic version number?

[Pxtl]

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

Re:Interesting - 5.1 the magic version number?

[The_K4]

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...... :)

Spell check

[JPriest]

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

WordPerfect 5.1

[www.sorehands.com]

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.

Re:WordPerfect 5.1

[kin_korn_karn]

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

Re:WordPerfect 5.1

[josquin00]

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.

Re:WordPerfect 5.1

[angkor]

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!

I remember...

[Maljin Jolt]

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.

Best Features of WordPerfect

[Verity_Crux]

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 $100 downgrade!

[John Harrison]

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.

WordPerfect 5

[pinkUZI]

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.

No starting any flame wars... Wordperfect 8

[KillerCow]

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 --

Microsoft format is REQUIRED by gov't

[GuyMannDude]

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

Re:Word: nice -- if and when...

[Anonymous Coward]

(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.

Re:You could say the same for

[Doug Merritt]

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.

Re:You could say the same for

[TheCrazyFinn]

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.

Re:You could say the same for

[tverbeek]

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.

Word 4.0 for Mac ruled.

[melatonin]

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.