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

[tom]

Well, as I recall, I got a copy of MsWord v-1 with my first PC compatible 
sometime in that time frame. I haven't been using it ever since... 8-).
A little WordStar, WordPerfect (until a little after Novel screwed them 
over), some text formatters, and OpenOffice.

Back to the begining of this piece, I have a vague, unsubstatiated 
recollection that RTF started out with a US Navy standard. I can easily be 
wrong there however.

On Wed, 26 Nov 2008, John Mills wrote:

> 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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