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Does anyone else find this disturbing?

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historically speaking the ms office program on mac was always developed by a different team using all new code. it was completely unlike the windows counterpart (version 2004, 2008, etc.) glad that team still functions as it should.
 
historically speaking the ms office program on mac was always developed by a different team using all new code. it was completely unlike the windows counterpart (version 2004, 2008, etc.) glad that team still functions as it should.
Not always. MS tried the unified code approach with Word 6. Slow and buggy under Windows, yet even worse on the Mac especially when compared to the superlative Word 5.1. If only MS would finally learn the same lesson for their other platforms that some code has to be built for the specific platform and can not be magically portable.
 
In the extreme, consider Corel Office for Java (1996). I tried the Word Perfect applet for about two hours, before I gave up. The idea was that if you had any platform that supported Java, you could run the Office suite. Didn't work out too well...
 
In the extreme, consider Corel Office for Java (1996). I tried the Word Perfect applet for about two hours, before I gave up. The idea was that if you had any platform that supported Java, you could run the Office suite. Didn't work out too well...
... Must have been similar to the Visicalc online FLASH version ;)
 
Microsoft got sloppy too, with the Office 97 applications:


"Here is something that you don't see every day. Word 97 running under NT 3.51. Have you ever wondered why the controls in Office 97 are so much more sluggish than other applications? Well, here is why: It draws all of the controls itself. This is very obvious when running under NT 3.51, as the native menus are 2-D, and the native window controls do not have the "X" button. While this does give NT 3.51 users a "95ish" experience, it is completely redundant in Windows 95 and NT 4. This also means that if a future Windows has 4-D ray-traced menus or such enhancements, Office 97 will not be able to take advantage of them."

nt351word.png
 
Thats pretty cool. I always liked Office 97. It got some heat because of the handholding and the annoying clipit.. But most people liked it. At the time I think I still prefered Office 4.0 with updates as it was super snappy.

I havent used NT3.51 since the 90's. I have never used NT 3.1 I should setup some machine with it and install a bunch of local talk / apple talk components just for fun.
 
Microsoft got sloppy too, with the Office 97 applications:


"Here is something that you don't see every day. Word 97 running under NT 3.51. Have you ever wondered why the controls in Office 97 are so much more sluggish than other applications? Well, here is why: It draws all of the controls itself. This is very obvious when running under NT 3.51, as the native menus are 2-D, and the native window controls do not have the "X" button. While this does give NT 3.51 users a "95ish" experience, it is completely redundant in Windows 95 and NT 4. This also means that if a future Windows has 4-D ray-traced menus or such enhancements, Office 97 will not be able to take advantag

e of them."

nt351word.png
Star Office 5.2 was similar but had more functionality and operated on a broad range of OSs. OS/2, Linix, UNIX Solaris, WinNT/Win9.x......Basicly an all in one office enviroment that looked the same no matter what GUI it was running in.
 
I didnt know that. I thought those were separate projects.

Nope. Sun released StarOffice 5.2 as open source and it was almost immediately forked to OpenOffice by purging a few remaining proprietary bits. And then, as often happens in these cases, Sun then based future versions on OpenOffice (IE, it became the mainline branch), just adding a few tweaks and the option of commercial support.

StarOffice ultimately died because Oracle. They burned most of Sun’s bridges to the open source community after the acquisition, and also didn’t have much of a reason to bother with an internal office suite by that point. But it certainly left a legacy.

798px-StarOffice_major_derivatives.svg.png
 
I also like Star Office. I have oft times found Libre Office to be a bit slow and sluggish.
 
Very interesting, have a link to a photo at full resolution?

Either way, the current platforms are what I would use over modern Microsoft office 365
 
Give me WinWord 2 back !

When I started Uni (late as I went to work first) we were originally not allowed to submit printed Lab work and reports and had to write everything out by hand, but in year two they finally relented. Started on WordPerfect 5.1 but the equation editor was blown away by WinWord 2. Suddenly everything was so easy :)

Makes me think, I'm getting old.

When I started work, I had to clock in and out on a proper punch card clock (millennials would probably faint at the injustice), there were no PC's on everyone's desk and led's were fancy 'new technology stuff'

I know to some on here, computers probably only just existed when they started, but I think back to working on thermionic valves, pneumatic control systems, clockwork boiler controls and all sorts of mechanical methods of measuring pressure, flow and level I can't believe how much the digital revolution has taken over.

But, I'm so grateful to have been a kid in the early 70's. We could do anything we wanted, go anywhere we wanted, climb anything we wanted, burn and blow up (almost) anything we wanted. It was a charmed time for those of us who survived relatively unharmed.
 
I had the same kind of childhood Gary.... My kids dont leave the house... If I make them go outside,, they wont leave the yard.. I dont get it.. Thier Generation is doomed. Imagine all the Therapists having to deal with a WHOLE GENERATION of kids who pissed thier youth away solitarily looking at a tiny screen rather than being out in the world with other kids.... Makes me sad.. But it makes me Happy to know I got to be a young boy burning, breaking, hiking, and Biking when I was little.
 
I had the same kind of childhood Gary.... My kids dont leave the house... If I make them go outside,, they wont leave the yard.. I dont get it.. Thier Generation is doomed. Imagine all the Therapists having to deal with a WHOLE GENERATION of kids who pissed thier youth away solitarily looking at a tiny screen rather than being out in the world with other kids.... Makes me sad.. But it makes me Happy to know I got to be a young boy burning, breaking, hiking, and Biking when I was little.
. . . and don't forget joy riding in the old man's car at 13 or 14 when he was asleep. Mom somehow never knew it was missing.
 
Started on WordPerfect 5.1

To this day I still sorely miss WordPerfect's Reveal Code function; to this day you can still run into stupid situations where some formatting "thing" gets submerged in a document and it turns into a circus trying to root it out. I was a pretty rabid WP 5.1 hacker back in the day; did actual "desktop publishing" with it, wrote stationary and label generation macros, mail merges... it's kind of depressing, actually, because I inevitably end up feeling kind of stupid and lost every time I sit down in front of Microsoft Word and need to do something even remotely advanced with it.
 
. . . and don't forget joy riding in the old man's car at 13 or 14 when he was asleep. Mom somehow never knew it was missing.
I never did this with my parents car. But when I would stay over my buddies house we would do it with his parents car when we were 14 and 15,,, Man what a rush.
 
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