Word 6.0 *shudder*

I guess it's time to make a confession: I used to be quite a fan of some Microsoft apps. one of them was IE 5 (or was that 4?), which back when it came out for the Classic MacOS was actually an aesthetically pleasing and quite fast browser.

Another one was Word 4.0. The way it handled predefined styles (or "formats" as they were called back then) was absolutely beautiful. Still a little awkward, but pretty intuitive. Add to that the speed with which it did its work and the effective use of screen real estate, and you had a really nice app. Then came word 5 (or rather, 5.1a), and it started eating up screen space and got noticeably slower. But that was okay. Our Mac was old, and I was used to the overall slowness. Then came Word 6, and I dropped Word like a hot potato.

So, I was delighted to find Rick Schaut's article on Word 6 for Mac, which beautifully shows you how this mess could actually occur, by telling you how it looked like for Rick, who was on the inside back then.

Luckily, most of my stuff that got printed by then were either reports (which were so simple I could do them in SimpleText), or the school newspaper (which we did with PageMaker). And these days, I hardly print anything. I draw my birthday cards by hand, because it's much more personal, and for the rest TextEdit's RTF support is actually more than I need, and my Uni stuff comes as PDFs anyway.