[geeks] From a local mailing list

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 3 May 2005, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

>> Sure.  I can buy a brand new Office -upgrade- for about $200, but not a
>> full version.
>
> The new versions, yes.  He said the 2003 version, which I've seen at
> computer shows for $100.

It's only AD 2005, and there's a -new version- after 2003?  Wasn't the
XP (2002) -> 2003 lifecycle short enough?  Wow.

I'm still running Office '97 and loving it.  It's the last version that
doesn't wholly suck.

> I don't see why this guy doesn't just order online somewhere.

Indeed.

> Microsoft generally can't police the OEM versions either, which cost
> about $25.

Generally, no, but, as much as I dislike most[0] things Microsoft, I
dislike the BSA showing up even more.  They're thugs, and relatively
inexpensive thugs to keep away if you stay a version behind "current".

> However, prior to Word97, the Windows versions of Word really was
> worse than the 97 version.  I rather use 97 than most of the newer
> versions as well.

I'm partial to Word 6 for Windows (which was they only good (if bloated)
release for Win16) and Word 5.1 for the Macintosh (which is possibly the
best GUI word processor in the history of the concept).  Given Win32,
I'll take Office '97 sans Outhouse.

> Of course, I don't much like any of them.  I always felt Word Perfect
> and others were better for the job of banging out words than Word ever
> was.

I've toyed with the idea of writing a WP51 for DOS clone for Unix that
spits out TeX documents.  It'd be fun, but I have so many more
productive projects on which I could spend time.

> I think the largest amount of work I've done was with TeX and nroff.
> It's just much easier when the documents get large.

Indeed.  I've not done much besides man pages with *roff, but TeX
(especially coupled with LaTeX) scale really well with obscenely large
documents; you just abstract them away into smaller chunks!


[0] I think older versions of Visual Studio and the core of the Win32
     API are right good code.  Pity that later VS and later Windows
     releases are such crap.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "It's alright for someone to sleep past noon every
Elgin, TX         (   once in a while.  That's what it means to be a
USA                )  free human being."       --Roger Smith, The Big O