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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?
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!
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?"
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
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# Modus Ponens
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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!!!!!!
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.
After reading this, I just had a horrible vision of ASCII Clippy integrated into vi.
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!
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.
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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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 --
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 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.
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.
After reading this, I just had a horrible vision of ASCII Clippy integrated into vi.
Ask, and ye shall receive.
Mwhahahahaha, mwhahahah, HAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!
(Okay, so he isn't ASCII. Deal with it.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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
There is an option you can install called pack-and-go. It makes a little executable file which will show your presentation. No Powerpoint installation needed on the machine used for the presentation. It's been in every version of powerpoint I can remember using.
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.
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.
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...
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! ~~
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.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
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 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.
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.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
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.
Power Point 2003 has a feature now that allows you to pack a presentation and burn it directly into a CD (or copy it to a floppy, if it's small enough) so that you don't have to carry around your laptop with you to all places.
For instance, in my school classes were several people are giving a presentation/seminar on the same day occur quite often. It's always a pain to wait for people to carry down their laptops and plug them to the beamer, specially when it decides to stop working. This usually irritates professors, who see how class time goes down the drain, as well as bored students who want to get out of the place as quickly as possible. I 'm always quite amused to see the relief on their faces when I just plug my USB keyholder into the last person's laptop and start my presentation within 3 minutes. It makes everybody happy and I think it has had a minimal positive effect on my presentation grades as well ;)
Quite handy if you ask me.
R.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
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.
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.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.