Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Yay R-10 ! happy to see you (figuratively speaking.)

Yeah, too bad SGI wasn't half as smart. They might have figured out that being able to read and write the occasional Word document even on a workstation was a desirable thing.

They did. Unfortunately it was too late when the port of OpenOffice (SGI contributed to development) made it to IRIX. For a while there was WordPerfect/IRIX, but in common with most UNIX apps it was quite highly priced.

Yes. But most SGI employees used Windoze. I never thought it was right. How do you know where your product is deficient if you never use it?

Perl and Smalltalk are good now?

I kid, I kid.... although I wonder what was the author's criteria to define "good vs. bad" languages.

The ones he likes vs the one he dislikes, if he's human

Probably most, especially later. But not always. I can say that in the mid-'90s, even the secretaries, sorry office administrators, in the Sacramento sales office used Indys. Took their notes in jot. Salespeople used Showcase.

Far from being impressed, I actually felt sorry for them.

I luckily never felt ‘sorry’ for anyone not having to use Windoze.

dc, you're letting the grey cells rewrite history. In the mid-nineties you had NT 3.5 and Windows 3.1 (Lose 95 wasn't released until almost '96) There was no reason to feel sorry for people using jot and Showcase ... I still save my work every five minutes because of that mid-nineties Windows trauma. Let us never forget that until Windows 2000, Microsoft products were ghastly abominable sewage.

Ha!


Perhaps a little bit, but I distinctly recall feeling that it must've made their lives difficult. Secretaries are not technical people. Lose 95 was probably just released. In any event, I'm sure Office was out in some form, and thought both Word and PowerPoint were superior, sorry. What I don't remember is how you might have even sent a presentation to someone back then - don't think there was pdf yet? Showcase files don't seem to be that portable. PowerPoint was more ubiquitous.

Agree that Win2K was the first good MS OS, but Office was a good product earlier. Any good new features since '97?

Office 3.0 for Windows was out in '92, and my recollection is that was the first reasonably mature version of it as a suite on Windows. It is a little hard to remember, but back then, even though PowerPoint existed, it wasn't nearly the standard that it is today. PowerPoint "culture" had yet to take hold. In the early to mid '90s, presentations still were much more likely to be done by overhead transparencies, often made with a photocopier, or, for more formal presentations, using 35 mm slides that were constructed by snapping photos of printouts or other original material. Anyone else remember applying adhesive lettering to photos by hand, placing the photos (or laser printer output) on a light table, and then taking pictures of the work for slide output? It seems like very ancient history, but it was pretty common practice even into the late '90s. There was even some competition in the electronic presentation market: Aldus (later Adobe) Persuasion lasted until the late 90s, some people liked using a product called More on the mac, and there were a few others.

As an aside, I remember ooh'ing and ah'ing over my group's first "portable" computer projector around 1998. It output a dim 640x480 pixels, and it was about the size and four times the weight of the suitcase my grandparents used to carry their worldly possessions from Italy to America 120 years ago.

As for Acrobat, version 2.0 came out in '94, with 1996's version 3.0 probably being the version that started to get real traction, especially on the net.

It's interesting that you remarked about Office 97. I worked for one of the world's largest science/tech oriented firms for about a decade, and the firm was very conservative about upgrading its basic software infrastructure, often skipping whole generations of Office. In 1997, the company standardized its appx 150k workers from a hodgepodge of platforms and tools to NT 4 and Office 97 (aside from scientists and a few others who required UNIX or Macs). While we upgraded quickly to Windows 2000 when it came out, we stayed on Office 97 globally until its end-of-support in 2004, when we migrated en masse to the XP flavor of Windows and Office. In all of those years of exchanging documents inside and outside of the company, I only recall two occasions where Office 97 didn't handle features from a newer release, and in both cases, they were fairly trivial things, like a type of animation or graphics transparency. AFAIK, the company remains on Windows/Office XP and is just starting to migrate to Win7. No idea what version of Office it is moving to.

I have a small business now, and we use Office 2008 on the Macs and Office 2003 on the PCs. I'm kicking the tires on Office 2010 to see if the interface overhaul and web features are worthwhile.

i used to have a similar workflow for stills to be prepped for gallery-grade display/exhibition. (a few years after) i'd occasionally reverse that, and output digital experiments to a LaserGraphics slide printer.


the printing/scanning businesses were like that too (most of them still are). good ol' master printers use their presses and the rest of their tech till they spit their guts off. pure quality style from people who can create any combo of cmyk with their own hands, eyes and nose.

if any sales guy tried to pitch 'em verbalism about obsoleteness (newer-better just because) they'd run him through the press.


(if you get a chance) i'd appreciate your feedback on the Mac versions jose. nothing to do with my own writing but new PA comes from the Office world and tells me that she can do things faster w/ Office. We use iWork now (got it free form Apple). all we need is a bunch of letters and the occasional excel budget sheet, pretty simple stuff when compared to corporate needs i guess.

I remember affixing the Polaroids that every scientific instrument used to capture images (microscope, SEM, interferometer) to papers and scanning them or photocopying them.

Great Acrobat info, thanks.


I probably used 97 just as long. Then 2000 until a year or two ago.....when I finally upgraded to 2003. What was I missing? I think '97 might have had some issue with long filenames or something, but I don't recall anything significant with anything newer. Can't stand looking at 2007. O'97 and Win2K (used @ home until 2007 - it's still running a few machines at the office) were the two best products MS ever made. XP isn't bad - but I didn't even run it at home until 6 years after it was released! We waited a few years at the office, too.

The compatibility you mentioned with O'97 was a problem for MS. It was too good. People weren't upgrading. That's why they came out with the docx BS in 07. They need people to have issues with their software so they want to upgrade. But how much further can you advance the word processor?

Let us know if there's anything good about O2010!

I've never been a fan of Word ... I hate the way it insists on "helping" me and turns a three-sentence letter into a 250 megabyte file.

First Choice was decent, then FootprintWorks was nice. deScribe was great, far superior to any version of Word. Ami Pro 3.1 for Windows 3.1 was just about the ideal size and the tabbed interface was a revelation. Smart Suite was equal to Word, maybe a little nicer. I bought Serif PagePlus for Windows 3.1 - that did a good job for brochures and the like. Ditched it when they went to Windows 95. People who can actually type like WordPerfect. Currently I use Open Orifice to read Word files (not a big fan) and Framemaker to create documents. Framemaker is pretty good and the output is superior to Word, imo.

There were lots of choices in the word processor arena, most of them better than Word. Ami Pro 3.1 would be nice on Unix. Or deScribe. Open Orifice is like, "Jeffrey Dahmer murdered 35 people so we should, too." Talk about copycat

If some of those companies had had a brain and charged a reasonable price for a word processor, Word would not have become so dominant.

It used to be fun to do artwork. There's nothing like the smell of Lepage's on a spring morning I'm not so sure the quality of the work is any better with PShop and Illustrator, either. There's sort of a sameness to all the computer-assisted artwork ...

I use office 07, not a big word user though (I've ranted on elsewhere about the virtues of mathematica). I use excel and outlook quite a lot and sometimes powerpoint. Change the color schemes to black and it will look fine. The UI is very different but I'm not sure if it is better or worse...

If I had my choice of word processor programme , I would choose none and just sit by the pool with babes. You're not supposed to like a word processor unless you're an author.

Around the mid '90s wasn't Aldus Premiere the go-to software for presentation? If I recall right the only reason PowerPoint took over was because of bundling (and then MS started to make it better).

Of course, few people had the LCD overlays for the projectors, so most big presentations weren't computer assisted.

I've used either Keynote or prezi.com for my last few presentations. Keynote can do that classic, super lame "PowerPoint" presentation that everyone's looking for without being too much of a royal pain (it's way easier to place text/images/charts properly in Keynote, in my experience, than it is in Powerpoint). Prezi is awesome in that it delivers similar information to a slide presentation, but has a neat format (zooming sheet) that makes you think about how the information you're presenting fits together. Plus their online creation and viewing tools have worked pretty well, in my experience. Even when I can't use it for an actual presentation, I'll sometimes use it just to brainstorm.

I think you mean Aldus Persuasion, later known as Adobe Persuasion, which was mentioned above.

You are right, of course, that the final nail in Persuasion's coffin was the bundling of PowerPoint into Microsoft Office. (Anyone remember what happened to Lotus 123 when Excel was bundled into Office?)

Beyond that, however, is the fact that none of the presentation software packages were particularly omnipresent until the late 90s, in part because of the absence of computer projectors. In those halcyon pre-bullet point days, most information sharing was in the long form: Word documents, printouts, etc.

I thought that Harvard Graphics was the de-facto standard for presentation software before PowerPoint. Did the Aldus package run on PCs too, or just Macs?

Excel took over from Lotus 1-2-3 because the mouse-driven interface and WYSIWYG editing made it much easier to use. It's a rare example of Microsoft actually developing a superior original product.

Quattro Pro competed for a while because it had similar advantages but I think it's the one that suffered more directly from the bundling of Excel in Office.

You're right about Harvard Graphics, and I almost mentioned HG in my earlier response, but I figured that we were already straying far enough off topic before bringing in even more software!

Come to think of it, I'll probably split these last few posts into a new thread...

Like many of the Aldus packages (and Microsoft packages like Excel and PowerPoint), Persuasion began on the Mac, but later versions were also available for PC. Persuasion never came close to HG's market share on the PC, since the PowerPoint/Office bundle started dominating the field not long after Persuasion came to the PC.

If those are your criteria, I'd have to disagree. 1-2-3 was just as capable as Excel and just as easy to use and just as mouse-driven. And the Lotus word processor is easily the equal of Word - i.e., both are bloated kluges. 80% of Excel users just use it to produce lists and schedules, anyhow.

If you can find a copy of Ami Pro 3.0, try it out. It's great.

The big differences were that Microsoft paid Ziff-Davis a lot more money plus at that time IBM was the bad guy while Mickeysoft was the golden-haired darling of the mainstream computer press.

(Would have to agree that Excel is one of the better things Mickey ever did, tho. Maybe the only decent thing they've ever done !)