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

Swear by?

[paulhar]

or at...

asdf

[professorhojo]

I gave up on word the day I clicked on a menu and an hourglass appeared. :(

Re:asdf

[lacrymology.com]

"I gave up on word the day I clicked on a menu and an hourglass appeared."

Well, Word has come quite a long way since then... they've upgraded to a really cool spinning rainbow disk now.
-m

5.1 for Mac

[squiggleslash]

In case anyone's confused (since Word for Windows jumped from Word 2 to Word 6 without any inbetween versions - take that Slackware!), this article is about Word 5.1 for Mac.

There was probably a DOS Word 5 too.

Re:5.1 for Mac

[iocat]

Word 5.1 was ok for a Microsoft product, but serious Mac word processors always used the blisteringly fast WriteNow (originally by T/Maker, later published by TLC). It was done in 68000 assembly and originally started as an Apple funded project which was a hedge against the possibility that MacWrite might not get done in time for the Macintosh launch.

In addition to the fastest word count ever seen (essential if you're a journalist), it also came with really well written and funny manuals. Even emulated on the first PowerMacs, it ran circles around WORD and had great line spacing abilities (essential if you're a student trying to hit a page count).

Re:5.1 for Mac

[innocent_white_lamb]

Microsoft Word for DOS 5.5a is available for free download from Microsoft here.

To install run "wd55_ben -d" after downloading, then run setup.exe

No, I have no idea why it's available for free download, but there it is,
free for all comers apparently.

fact

[Barbarian]

MS Word jumped from like 2.0 to 5.1 to "catch up" with Wordperfect.

Re:fact

[DavidBrown]

So, Apple changed the numbering system on their OS. They went from OS-9 to OS-X, completely skipping OS's A through W.

Goddamn hypocrites.

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.

It's true

[ajs]

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.

No impossible

[MemoryDragon]

Word 5.1 did not have clippy... the most important thing which was ever integrated into a word processor.

Old Testament Wrath-Of-God type stuff

[stinkyfingers]

The best word processor ever created for a Mac was written by Microsoft? What's the I see outside my office window?

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria!!!!!!

Re:Strange...

[nocomment]

I'd swear by openoffice, but I'm still waiting for it to finish loading.

Re:Spell check

[niko9]

Have you tried Abiword?

Small, fast, light and with spellcheck. Will let you save as .doc also, which lets me print out all my papers at school wheer they only have windos and mac boxes.

Re:Interesting - 5.1 the magic version number?

[lacrymology.com]

Gator eWallet version 5.1 was the pinnacle of scumware.

-m

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.

Word: nice -- if and when...

[Doug Merritt]

When I use Windows at work, Word is powerful and pretty nice...if and when it works. It doesn't crash on me, but it does refuse to do what I tell it sometimes; power users get used to doing workarounds, so it's not that big of a deal if you use it every single day -- you memorize its idiosyncracies.

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.

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

[JBv]

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.

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

[XeRXeS-TCN]

At the risk of sounding like a spokesman, if you think OpenOffice takes a while to load up (it *can* be kinda slow at times) or you don't like the various releases of Word, you can always use Abiword.

It is quite lightweight (only needs a 486 and 16mb of RAM to run) despite looking very similar in style and operation to the latest versions of both OOo and MS Word. It's also compatible with both Word and OOo, and supports many other formats both internally and via plugins, such as WordPerfect etc.

Personally, I have OOo and Abiword installed, so that I can use Abiword for word processing, and OOo for spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations whenever I need to. I also run Abiword on my old 300MHz laptop, and it runs with no lag whatsoever, unlike when I tried running OOo on it.

one man's bloat is another man's feature

[cascadingstylesheet]

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.

Two words - Task Pane

[Cumstien]

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.

Re:Strange...

[ignorant_newbie]

you may not have any MSOffice _windows_ running, but I'll bet you a copy of Office XP that if you check your 'startup items' folder, you'll find that office is preloading it'self at boot.

This isn't a bad thing, Just be aware of it when making comparisions. OOo is taking longer because it's not already there.

CLIPPY!!!!

[Kpt Kill]

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