[ale] Holy War! Holy War! Re: RTF

John Mills johnmills at speakeasy.net
Wed Nov 26 10:53:31 EST 2008


Minority of one here.

I started using MsWord with v-3 in roughly 1984. My significant driver was 
Word's good handling for printers available where I worked, especially an 
Apple laser printer. I then also found Word's models of document structure 
and organization far better matched to my writing approach than those of 
WordPerfect. (I can't give OpenOffice very high marks on this yet, either, 
but I do still have some hope.)

Both Word (with RTF) and WordPerfect (whatever) used markup languages that 
were essentially embedded text, but Word used a bit of encryption to 
obfuscate things. (What an original thought!)

I always thought it clear evidence of poor design that WordPerfect users 
spent so much time staring at the "Display Codes" screen; you could see 
that on consoles as you walked from office to office down the hall. 
(Remember having _offices_?)

As to quality -- well, there are still even some hard-core Word*Star users 
out there! Go figure!!

Flame on -- it's the "silly season".

  - Mills

On Wed, 26 Nov 2008, Jeff Lightner wrote:

> What crap!

> MS Word took off for one reason - They gave it away along with Excel and
> Access because the people PAYING for software new Word sucked compared
> to WordPerfect and Excel sucked compared to Lotus 123.   Not only did
> they give it away - they forced PC manufacturers to bundle in on new PCs
> with the threat of NOT being allowed to include DOS/Windows.   Once MS
> Office became the defacto standard they quit giving it away.


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