• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Which word processing software was considered the absolute best on Win 3.xx?

My position is the opposite of yours: If "reveal codes" is necessary, your interface has failed the user (ie. by allowing them to get themselves in such a position that showing the on/off codes is necessary to resolve it).

My position comes from a place of never having needed such functionality in DOS or Windows MS Word over a 35-year period using said products (having switched over from Sorcim's SuperWriter, for the curious). You must have encountered many more obstinate users in your career than I have.
 
Apparently you've lived a charmed life, because I frankly don't think I've *ever* dealt with a "classic" Word document generated by someone else that wasn't a horrible mess. (A problem that gets worse and worse the more it's passed around.) The curse of Word isn't that it's "easy to use", it's easy to use extremely badly.

I do think the situation with Word docs has improved substantially since they moved away from the binary .DOC to a formalized XML file format. It seems like the latter at least does some active garbage collection when saving things; The old format was basically a "Pickle" of the in-memory representation and it was infamous for its Katamari Damacy-esque talent for gathering cruft as a document was edited and re-edited...
 
Indeed; there's a cool article floating around out there that describes gap buffers and how Word was much faster after switching to a variant of them, but I can't find the article now. IIRC, one of the main complaints of Word in the 90s is that documents took too long to save and load, so they just dumped/restored the memory buffers and structs. Which lead to the pickling you mentioned.

As for unruly word docs, I usually educated the users on how to remove all formatting, then start again, when they got themselves in a bind. It was usually faster than me trying to figure out what they'd done :)
 
Yep. Anyway. To be clear, I'm not advocating that anyone use WordPerfect today, nor suggesting it was a "good" alternative to Word; the good folks in Orem *really* fouled up trying to transition their product to a GUI version... and frankly, I would never actually argue the *interface* for the DOS version was any good either. It's just that the latter managed to be feature complete and reliable enough to rise above its inherent flaws.

As for Word, well, yeah, I think a lot of its problems really map pretty generically onto a matrix of bad habits that any freeform GUI/WYSIWYG word processor ends up encouraging in novice users... and coincidentally often *prevent* said users from improving their skills. An arcane unfriendly word processor like WordPerfect actually helps keep those people on the straight and narrow, IE, they're disincentivized to worry about anything other than their actual *prose*, instead of feeling empowered to try making their documents "pretty". (With a lot of ad-hoc highlight and clicking that leaves the document a horribly unstructured mess.) Maybe it's elitist to say this, but I kind of feel like it was a mistake to tear down the wall between "word processing" and "document processing/slash/desktop publishing.

(And of course I'm immediately marked as a hypocrite because I did to "desktop publishing" of a sort in WordPerfect, but... basically, if you have WordPerfect 5.1 and a fancy printer like a Postscript model you can basically use direct code editing as a terrible knockoff LaTeX wannabe. Which *is* using the wrong tool for the job, but at the time it was the tool I had.)
 
I think word processors are like hammers: If it gets the nail in the board, it's a competent tool. I don't typically play favorites, but I do occasionally cast the Reveal Codes line into the water and see what I pull up ;-)

What I like about vintage computing in general is that nearly every single computer ever made can be a functional word processor. In particular, I like seeing how early programs tackled problems in that space (was there ever an 8-bit word processor that allowed editing documents larger than available system RAM, up to the size of the physical magnetic media?). Homeword had a crude graphical page preview displayed at all times, a cute feature in 1983. AppleWriter (and likely others) would inverse-video a character to denote it as upper-case, and show all other characters normally to denote lower-case, on systems that only displayed upper-case letters. Spell checkers still fascinate me as to how useful they could be in such limited space and speed environments; some clever programming probably went into those. Even WordStar's "stupid pet trick" of encoding spaces "for free" in the upper bit of the character still amuse me.
 
Trixter said:
was there ever an 8-bit word processor that allowed editing documents larger than available system RAM, up to the size of the physical magnetic media?
Click to expand...

Scripsit for the TRS-80 Model II/12/16 series did, as did SuperScripsit for the TRS-80 Models I/III/4. (The latter was basically a port of the former.) It had kind of a bad reputation for turning documents into egg salad if its "virtual memory" implementation hiccuped, but when it worked it was a pretty good word processor. Even had an integrated spell checker if you had enough online disk space for it. (Pretty much needed a 3 drive system to really fly. Preferably double sided/double density.) Used to play with story-sculpting on it in the middle of the night on my garage sale Model I back in the 1990's and, honestly, it was basically as good as using your average DOS PC word processor circa 1986 or so. The disk shuffling was pretty fast.

It's a little odd that a word processor like this existed on a system that has such a reputation for being "crude", but... weirdly, the TRS-80 actually had a lot of surprisingly sophisticated ideas show up in its disk software. Like how even humble old TRSDOS for the Model I used an overlay system to automatically shuffle bits of itself in and out of memory on demand. (Downside: you pretty much have to have a system disk in drive zero *all the time*.)
 
Plasma said:
Best is subjective but it probably comes down to either Word or WordPerfect.
Click to expand...
Had both WP5.1 for DOS and Word2 for Win3.11. Probably used Word more. In reality, I probably could still use Word2 now for no more than I ask of a word processor. Much simpler and not the behemoth that almost all word processors have become. There was some add-in available for Write for Windows (the built-in Application) that turned it into a mostly-full-fledged word processor. Had it for a while as well and AFAIR, I could have lived with just that too.
 
Trixter said:
was there ever an 8-bit word processor that allowed editing documents larger than available system RAM, up to the size of the physical magnetic media?
Click to expand...
Was Wordstar bound by RAM? It's not that virtual documents are particularly hard to do technically. At a (very) rough level, CP/M ED fits the bill, it's just all managed manually.

The problem, of course, is that 8-bit floppy systems are really slow and that can get in the way of editing. (This more often shows up during search/document navigation vs actual entry and changing of text.)
 
Here's another vote for AmiPro and it's successor of sorts Lotus WordPro. I did full page layout with AmiPro and WordPro much like what could be done in PageMaker/InDesign, just in a cruder fashion.

I still use WordPro on Linux in Codeweaver's Crossover product.
 
whartung said:
Was Wordstar bound by RAM? It's not that virtual documents are particularly hard to do technically. At a (very) rough level, CP/M ED fits the bill, it's just all managed manually.
Click to expand...

I don't believe so--I recall working with some really large documents under CP/M and not having any problems. But if you're talking 8-bit Memorite for the Vector Graphic was pretty good for the time, as was Spellbinder for the Eagle.
 
WordStar definitely buffers the document to disk -- on a 64K CP/M system, anything longer than about two pages, IIRC. If you shut off the computer without closing the document first, it would leave behind temporary files with the .$$$ extension.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top