Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

I stuck with Office 97 until last year, when I finally switched to Office 2000 (and only because it supported the newer DocX format). I was pleased to discover that Office 2000 looks and feels almost exactly like Office 97 - at least Microsoft knew not to mess with a good thing in that case.

Funny thing, I remember that when Office 97 came out during my freshman year of college, it was much more bloated and slower than Office 95. I hated how the toolbar buttons looked like pixellated crap when you double-sized them, and it was the first version to feature that abominable paperclip and all the annoying automatic spell-checking and formatting. Even with all that crap disabled, it still ran less-than-swiftly on my Pentium 133. Never would have guessed that I'd stick with it for over a decade!

As far as Windows itself, I think NT 4.0 was the first "good" version. Win2k may be much more convenient (PnP, USB, FireWire, etc), but with SP6a NT 4 is extremely stable and quite a bit more streamlined. I used it for my animated short, and it handled dual-CPU 3D animation & rendering and video editing quite well. Of all Windows versions, it probably feels the most like IRIX (for whatever that's worth).

I think I got started with Lotus Symphony! Anyone else use it? Beautiful integrated text mode glory!

Really wanted Ami Pro when it came out, but never got a chance to use it.

Also, josehill, while I agree that the PowerPoint culture wasn't as prevasive before projectors, overheads were common (reason for the Presenter display!) and some people did like to do a better job than a marker pen. Needed to physically print the transparencies - now no one cares anymore. I think I first used a program called SlideWrite, and wish I had HG.


That was kind of my point - I don't think there was anything major through 2003. Maybe Office XP was some kind of outlier? Skipped that one. I think most of the changes in Office were actually in Outlook through 03.

You can feel safe going all the way up to 03, aj.

I think what made "office" such a big seller in corporate environments was the whole backoffice (or was it backorifice) and then the whole exchange/lookout integration. Which almost none of the competitors either properly integrated, or missed completely. Also MS undercut almost every other major office suite out there.

I remember when knowing wordperfect commands was a requirement for many secretarial positions and at some point it ran on almost every platform from VMS, to NeXTStep to DOS. Ami ran in windows 2.x which means it may predate Word for windows. In fact the only time I used was when it came in a set of disks, which you ran from DOS and which bootstrapped its own version of windows 2.x to run the program. It sucked.

What I seem to remember from the old days, is that before the "powerpoint" culture there were packages like Harvard Graphics which dominated that sort of market. But the focus I think at that time was more in the generation of charts/graphs than in the production of automated slide shows. I think in the late 80s and early 90s a 3D pie chart with more than 3 colors was still something that caused awe among audiences.

The oldest presentation package I remember using was an odd thing produced by IBM named "IBM Storyboard" does anyone remember using that? The oldest word processors I remember seeing were: Wordstar, WordPerfect, and IBM Writing Assistant.

IMHO Other than the obvious font and WYSIWYG features, and maybe the whole real-time spelling.... most people really do not use more than that out of their word processors. At least I haven't really never needed anything more complex than that when writing letters.

What I despise out of the whole powerpoint culture is that it really limits the way information is presented and exposed. And as for office, I hate the fact that most internal corporate communications now involve people attaching word documents, when they could simply write a simple mail message.... and then those word documents themselves are nothing but a container for a whole excel spreadsheet where the people just dumped raw data. I can't tell you the number of 20+ MB e-mail messages I get per day, where the whole point is the sender telling me "look at this data" (this data being a couple of odd numbers) out of a spreadsheet of tens of megabytes of data. Multiply that by the number of employees involved in the mail thread, and the back and forth that ensues and soon.... you just generate some insane bandwidth requirements just to look at 10 f@#king numbers. It is awesome...

Maybe so, but that wasn't my experience. When I first used Excel 2 in 1989 (under runtime Windows/286!) it was miles beyond text-mode 1-2-3 that used the "/" key for accessing keystroke menus. I don't think there was a graphical 1-2-3 yet, nor could it use a mouse. The WYSIWYG capability of 1-2-3 at that time was simply a print preview. All changes to the spreadsheet were done in text mode.

The calculation features weren't anything that 1-2-3 couldn't do, but it blew it away in the usability department. If Lotus had a graphical version, we didn't have it where I worked at the time.

We still exited to DOS to run WordPerfect, though!

You're one of three human beings still living who have actually seen that program

By the time spreadsheets were common, 1-2-3 was just as graphical. I still say that marketing was a major factor in the way Mickey conquered the office world.

The spreadsheet that's neat is Mesa. You can have live inputs in the cells. Pretty spiffy feature, does Excel even have that ?

"By the time spreadsheets were common"? Seriously? VisiCalc was THE killer app for microcomputers in the early '80s, to say nothing of how successful MultiPlan and 1-2-3 were. Excel on Windows was nearly ten years after VisiCalc popularized the spreadsheet idea.

If so, that's scary. I'm only 38.

"automated" slide show = hand removes transparency from binder, switches transparency with one on overhead, returns original to binder....

By the mid '90s I think it was common to use presentation packages to make bulleted or otherwise text slides as well as charts and graphs - at least I did, maybe even earlier.


To some extent, that's true. OTOH, it helps get some people to document work - and that might otherwise not happen. The number of engineers who don't know how to use PowerPoint shocks me, and is only slightly less of a problem than those that won't - "Oh, I don't need to make any slides, I'm just going to hold the design review with the client via WebEx (or in person), pull up the CAD, and go over it directly with them". You know what happens if you let them get away with that, right? Client doesn't remember anything. Expectations magically aren't met. He said/she said.....

As per your other point, the only reason a Word file should ever be attached to an email is if its being sent to someone off-site for editing! If not, pdf! Those BS 20MB Word docs often print down to a half meg pdf.

Sure, but Visicalc sold a total of one million copies over its entire lifetime, give or take a dozen. Nowadays Mickeysoft wouldn't even fire up the printer for software that only sold a million copies. Harley-Davidson made more money than that selling panties. Let's face it, NONE of this stuff was what you'd call "common" until quite a bit later.

True, I know exactly what you mean. My beef with powerpoint is that mos people simply use the templates corporate comes up with. So most presentations end up being more focused on the formating that on the information itself. Some forms of information do not map well to the format pre-stablished, and then fun ensues Esp. when it comes to share technical information. I would love to see some sort of presentation package which allowed to "build" the information you are trying to convey. Most of the time among the engineering teams I work with, we have to share process information. And it would be great to see visually in a more natural fashion that what powerpoint allows to see the process come together.




The main reason for those files, is that those are "live" documents. People have to make changes and revisions. I think office is the spawn of the devil, because they focus on shitty incremental useless changes (I mean how many times do they have to move the items in the menu around?). While the real stuff they should be working on: centralized document repositories, for real time, organization-wide updates, and truly "transparent" collaborative workflows are such an afterthought. That people end up doing it the brute force way: via mass e-mail of attachments.

I think that people doing things like openoffice et al, may be focused a bit much in copying everything that is wrong with office and which office does very well, while neglecting what office does poorly and try to find their niche there. How many times does the same single-user word processor paradigm (lol I never thought I would use that word) have to be reinvented, honestly.

Anyhow, speaking of spreadsheets. Does anyone what ever happened to Lotus Improv? I remember reading back in the day when I was a kid, that it was supposed to be the bees knees replacement for 1-2-3. I think it ran on nextstep?

When you take into account the orders of magnitude difference in total market size for personal computer software between 1982 and now, I maintain that it is still a relevant comparison.

You're forgetting the marketing potential of having a different interface and different file format. Your organization might be doing just fine with Word 97, but the new people coming out of school where they have the new software (that MS almost gives away) look at your software and say "how do you do ____? I don't know how to do _____!" and MS points out the lost productivity because you didn't "upgrade". For the home users, well they start getting stuff in an "incompatible" file format. True, you can download the filters from MS (back to a point), but how many go out and buy a copy of Office 2007 just so they can open .docx files? Probably a not-insignificant number.



Again it's marketing, same deal with the "why do we have so many Linux desktops trying to do a mediocre-to-passable job of emulating Windows with all its UI gaffes". Management or end-users see it and recognize it and think "this looks like what it's supposed to (i.e. MS), it must be OK." That and the trend today emphasizing flash over substance (there must be more people out there who find transparent windows irritating, distracting and occasionally confusing).

Getting my cane and hobbling back to my rocker to growl at the passing kids...

But how many of them are off-site? I agree that revision and document control systems would be a much better use of MS time. But if the email thing is working, it shows that the folks doing the work don't really _need_ the fancy stuff, and simply keeping the damn document on a network drive is a much better use of resources than emailing the thing around. If at all possible, I now tell them it's too big for my inbox, I must have more crap than they do. I respond with emails containing links to the file "file:///P:/1020-15/Blah.xls" that they can click on if it's beyond their capabilities to find it on the network.

And actually I'm somewhat glad MS focused on "shitty incremental useless changes" - that's why I had no problem using anything from O'97 through O'2003, it's the same damn program. I refused to use 2007 because I didn't want to have to deal with whatever screw up they made to it.

I didn't realize 07 was that different from 03. Outlook works the same, word works the same (you type stuff in and it gets printed out) excel is the same (you type numbers in boxes and add the boxes together) powerpoint works the same. Yes, they moved around all the buttons on the top. They probably spent a million bucks per button figuring out where they should be moved to. Is there something I'm missing? are you upset that the gray background is now shiny black (or blue or red or whatever colors you can set it to?)

I have 07 and 03, and 07 can read the files from 03 and 03 can read the files from 07. Sure, 07 bitches a little bit when you save in the old format and 03 takes an extra half second to open the new format. The price of progress

You guys are all, change is bad! change is bad! MS has to stay in business somehow, and coming up with new stuff is how they do it...

Why ?

Not really. I'm just pointing out that now generally a big focus of the change is on the look because the substance doesn't sell as well. The people who are interested in the substance often don't control the checkbooks, and many end-users don't really understand or care to understand the substance. I was pointing out how you can use targeted UI changes to encourage upgrades where there might not otherwise be a sale, although I am slightly irritated that MS felt the necessity to take a standard and craft a new proprietary format around it that they claim is "open" when there are plenty of other true standards that work.

Reading the other posts (especially R10ks) it seems like exactly the opposite is being argued - that there really isn't any substantive change going on at all, it's just the window dressing (and features of dubious usability such as the infamous "auto summarize"). The true, groundbreaking changes often seem to stall out.

spreadsheets and word processors still do the same thing since the 80s. There are groundbreaking changes, they don't go into the bread and butter word, but rather into other programs. Lots of innovation in plain old text editors, for example, that wouldn't make sense in a word processor. CAS systems have innovations that wouldn't make sense in a spreadsheet, though there are always new functions etc.

There's not too many ways that you can jazz up a word processor before the program fits into a different genre...

*weakly raises hand*
Be..be..because I still have them in my portfolio?

Sell it. Buy BP. When word comes out about the secret talks with Shell, BP will skyrocket. Then sell it.

There's your friendly tip for the day

LOL. Fat chance Hamei: I hate capitalism, but I love retirement.

I am a man of many contradictions.