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Comment by transfire

5 years ago

Because it works and works well.

Not that there haven't been improvements in word processing programs since, but mostly its been fluff and bad UI.

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transfire

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throwaway8581  5 years ago

If you need any good control of page layout and design, DOS-era word processing is going to be worthless or unusable.

Sure, old word processors are perfectly fine for writing a stream of unformatted prose, but so is wordpad, and that’s not even the main task that word processors are for.

  • technofiend  5 years ago

    What? Page layout and design is not the exclusive domain of software written in the last few years. Wordstar, Word Perfect, Electric Pencil, Display Write and many others programs contemporary to that era gave people enough control to write books, term and research papers, legal documents of every stripe and anything else you care to name. WYSIWYG made it far easier for the general public to perform typesetting tasks but that's not what we're talking about here.

  • at_a_remove  5 years ago

    Authors typically do not do page layout and design, that's handled at another level.

    However, I was able to manage quite a lot of both using Appleworks on the ][e in the 1980s. Formatting prose (rather than layout) was definitely in the mix: bold, italics, underline, font sizes. I would say that Appleworks made HTML rather easy for me to learn when it first came out, because you had to open and close each formatting option, rather like tags.