Nostalgia Bulletin
I wouldn't normally recommend you take a look at a current MacUser because, frankly, they're a bit skimpy on the old content, but there's some interesting stuff in the current issue (vol 21 #22), because they're celebrating their 20th anniversary (how it works out they're at #22 in vol 21, then, we'll gloss over).
The two most interesting bits to my ass are on pages 46-47, and they're reprints of columns written by Stephen Fry and the late Douglas Adams. Not by coincidence, I'm sure, both reprints carry some mention of word processing and word counts.
This immediately takes you back-in-the-day, before every man/woman and his/her dog were calling themselves Designers, before digital video, before it was easy to record multi-track audio, before, lawks, the innernet - people (rich people!) used to buy Macs to do a bit of writing - using nicer fonts than you got on golfball and daisywheel typewriters.
Do you detect my bitterness? I was so chronically hard up back-in-the-day, that the idea of buying a Mac never even crossed my radar. I looked at the Canon StarWriter... I had a Brother Golfball typewriter (with - o yes - 3 different golfballs), and then I had a Panasonic wordprocessor thingy with a 14-line LCD screen and a floppy disk drive.
But back-in-the-day, for the likes of Fry and Adams, if you had a Mac, you had a choice of word processor. You could use Word, or WordPerfect, MacWrite, MacAuthor, Nisus Writer, MiniWRITER...
My first experience on a Mac was in 1992. I remember being a bit bamboozled that there were 5 or 6 different word processors on the machine I was using. Which was best? No-one could say.
When I bought my first 'puter proper, it was - on my wife's recommendation - a Mac, and boy am I glad. The first word processor I bought and paid for (as opposed to the free ClarisWorks one) was WordPerfect. I soon went back to using ClarisWorks, but that's another story.
But if you ever want an in-a-nutshell reason why Microsoft are crap, look no further than these reprinted columns. Stephen Fry complains that word counts appear to be inaccurate and random, and mentions two different word count utilities. Why? Douglas Adams has the answer: even as late as Word version 3 Microsoft still hadn't got around to putting in a word count feature. Now, I ask you: what student, journalist, author, or other writerly type would not consider a word count to be an essential must-have? Nobody at Microsoft, that's for sure.
There's more. Apart from not having a word count, Adams reports, Word was also incapable - back then, version 3 - of converting inch marks to quotation marks. This is the kind of thing that always enrages me. The biggest, bombastic, fuck-off word processor on the market today was basically a shoddily put together piece of crap until - probably - its fifth iteration. Meanwhile, Microsoft and its major shareholders made a massive fortune (and, until 1995, this was how MS made its fortune) selling crap versions of Word to Mac users.
How on earth did that happen?
The two most interesting bits to my ass are on pages 46-47, and they're reprints of columns written by Stephen Fry and the late Douglas Adams. Not by coincidence, I'm sure, both reprints carry some mention of word processing and word counts.
This immediately takes you back-in-the-day, before every man/woman and his/her dog were calling themselves Designers, before digital video, before it was easy to record multi-track audio, before, lawks, the innernet - people (rich people!) used to buy Macs to do a bit of writing - using nicer fonts than you got on golfball and daisywheel typewriters.
Do you detect my bitterness? I was so chronically hard up back-in-the-day, that the idea of buying a Mac never even crossed my radar. I looked at the Canon StarWriter... I had a Brother Golfball typewriter (with - o yes - 3 different golfballs), and then I had a Panasonic wordprocessor thingy with a 14-line LCD screen and a floppy disk drive.
But back-in-the-day, for the likes of Fry and Adams, if you had a Mac, you had a choice of word processor. You could use Word, or WordPerfect, MacWrite, MacAuthor, Nisus Writer, MiniWRITER...
My first experience on a Mac was in 1992. I remember being a bit bamboozled that there were 5 or 6 different word processors on the machine I was using. Which was best? No-one could say.
When I bought my first 'puter proper, it was - on my wife's recommendation - a Mac, and boy am I glad. The first word processor I bought and paid for (as opposed to the free ClarisWorks one) was WordPerfect. I soon went back to using ClarisWorks, but that's another story.
But if you ever want an in-a-nutshell reason why Microsoft are crap, look no further than these reprinted columns. Stephen Fry complains that word counts appear to be inaccurate and random, and mentions two different word count utilities. Why? Douglas Adams has the answer: even as late as Word version 3 Microsoft still hadn't got around to putting in a word count feature. Now, I ask you: what student, journalist, author, or other writerly type would not consider a word count to be an essential must-have? Nobody at Microsoft, that's for sure.
There's more. Apart from not having a word count, Adams reports, Word was also incapable - back then, version 3 - of converting inch marks to quotation marks. This is the kind of thing that always enrages me. The biggest, bombastic, fuck-off word processor on the market today was basically a shoddily put together piece of crap until - probably - its fifth iteration. Meanwhile, Microsoft and its major shareholders made a massive fortune (and, until 1995, this was how MS made its fortune) selling crap versions of Word to Mac users.
How on earth did that happen?
posted by Anonymous at
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
1 Comments:
Nowadays many of us have to use Windows for routine printing of web pages yet IE's rendering still chops the right hand edge off of most A4 page prints.
I know its fixable and that Firefox is better etc, but the reality is that people seem to put up with the most basic faults.
rashbre
By
rashbre, at 11:16 am
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