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[The Natural Philosopher]

Re: changed subject for experiement on threading orders

Tony Bryer wrote:
> On Fri, 28 May 2010 08:03:54 -0500 BillW50 wrote :
>> Which is also funny, since I like MS Office 2000 the best out of all of
>> the Office versions. I probably would like MS Office 98 a lot too, but
>> it crashed and burned a lot. Instead of fixing it, MS had you to get MS
>> Office 2000 instead which is stable IMHO.
>
> Having been a Lotus WordPro user since it first came out, I struggle with
> Word every time I am forced to use it. But I think I may yet have to:
> WordPro runs on Windows 7 but every time an warning dialog appears first.
> If MS spent millions on usability studies for Word, I have failed to
> notice their effect.
>
that's because although they did the studies, they followed the results
of the second study 'What features make this software look complicated,
expensive, impressive and impenetrable, and therefore worth what we want
to charge' instead.

 

[BillW50]

Re: changed subject for experiement on threading orders

On 5/28/2010 7:16 PM, Tony Bryer wrote:
> On Fri, 28 May 2010 08:03:54 -0500 BillW50 wrote :
>> Well I don't know why Microsoft doesn't fix some stuff? Well I kind of
>> do. As I had a beef with them say around '84 about some bug in their
>> MS-DOS that would show up if you were a software developer.
>>
>> Well it turns out that MS knew about it and they were not going to fix
>> it. And the reason was that other software developers already found
>> what I found. And they coded their programs around the bug. And MS
>> claimed if they fixed the bug, it would break thousands and thousands
>> of programs already written.
>
> Have you read Raymond Chen's 'The Old New Thing' - some of the stories he
> recounts about things done at MS to keep badly behaved programs working
> on newer versions of DOS/Windows are amazing.
>
> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/12/07/1233002.aspx

No I didn't, but I believe I will now.

--
Bill
Thunderbird Portable 3.0 (20091130)

 

[BillW50]

Re: changed subject for experiement on threading orders

On 5/28/2010 7:16 PM, Tony Bryer wrote:
> On Fri, 28 May 2010 08:03:54 -0500 BillW50 wrote :
>> Which is also funny, since I like MS Office 2000 the best out of all of
>> the Office versions. I probably would like MS Office 98 a lot too, but
>> it crashed and burned a lot. Instead of fixing it, MS had you to get MS
>> Office 2000 instead which is stable IMHO.
>
> Having been a Lotus WordPro user since it first came out, I struggle with
> Word every time I am forced to use it. But I think I may yet have to:
> WordPro runs on Windows 7 but every time an warning dialog appears first.
> If MS spent millions on usability studies for Word, I have failed to
> notice their effect.

I don't know, I always thought Word was easy. WordStar was the word
processor that was the hardest for me to learn. Although the nice thing
about WordStar, all your efforts were well worth it. Many writers used
it. Even Bill Gates wrote code with it.

--
Bill
Thunderbird Portable 3.0 (20091130)

 

[Dave]

Re: changed subject for experiement on threading orders

Tony Bryer wrote:
> On Fri, 28 May 2010 08:03:54 -0500 BillW50 wrote :
>> Which is also funny, since I like MS Office 2000 the best out of all of
>> the Office versions. I probably would like MS Office 98 a lot too, but
>> it crashed and burned a lot. Instead of fixing it, MS had you to get MS
>> Office 2000 instead which is stable IMHO.
>
> Having been a Lotus WordPro user since it first came out, I struggle with
> Word every time I am forced to use it. But I think I may yet have to:
> WordPro runs on Windows 7 but every time an warning dialog appears first.
> If MS spent millions on usability studies for Word, I have failed to
> notice their effect.

You are like me, I was brought up on Lotus software, as I have brought
up my wife the same way. Being Canadian, it blends in with my way of
thinking, where as word is alien to me.

Will I bend and move to word? It will be a cold week in hell before I do.

Dave

 

[Tony Bryer]

Re: changed subject for experiement on threading orders

On Sat, 29 May 2010 09:27:05 -0500 BillW50 wrote :
> I don't know, I always thought Word was easy. WordStar was the word
> processor that was the hardest for me to learn. Although the nice
> thing about WordStar, all your efforts were well worth it. Many
> writers used it. Even Bill Gates wrote code with it.

On PCs I started with a word processor called Arnor Protext of which
I remember nothing, then switched to WordStar because all the key
shortcuts were the same as in the Borland Turbo editors (Borland
copied the WS ones of course). I still use some of the shortcuts in
Delphi.

--
Tony Bryer, Greentram: 'Software to build on' Melbourne, Australia
www.superbeam.co.uk www.eurobeam.co.uk www.greentram.com