Comment by tombert
21 hours ago
> Computers have been powerful enough for productivity tasks for 20 years
It baffles me how usable Office 97 still. I was playing with it recently in a VM to see if it worked as well as I remembered, and it was amazing how packed with features it is considering it's nearing on thirty. There's no accounting for taste but I prefer the old Office UI to the ribbon, there's a boatload of formatting options for Word, there's 3D Word Art that hits me right in the nostalgia, Excel 97 is still very powerful and supports pretty much every feature I use regularly. It's obviously snappy on modern hardware, but I think it was snappy even in 1998.
I'm sure people can enumerate here on the newer features that have come in later editions, and I certainly do not want to diminish your experience if you find all the new stuff useful, but I was just remarkably impressed how much cool stuff was in packed into the software.
I think MS Word was basically feature-complete with v4.0 which ran on a 1MB 68000 Macintosh. Obviously they have added lots of UI and geegaws, but the core word processing functionality hasn't really changed at all.
(edit to say I'm obviously ignoring i8n etc.)
My dad used to run a whole commercial bank on MS Office 4.0 and a 386. (A small one, but still!)
Small, medium and large colleges in the UK ran on Novell servers and 386 client machines with windows for workgroups and whatever Office they came with. I think the universities were using unixy minicomputers then though. Late 80s early 90s. Those 386 machines were built like tanks and survived the tender ministrations of hundreds of students (not to mention some of the staff).
I love this story where a C64 in Poland rans a Auto repair shop.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a23139/c...
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It's wild to remember that I basically grew up with this type of software. I was there, when the MDI/SDI (Multi-Document Interface / Single-Document Interface) discussion was ongoing, and how much backlash the "Ribbon"-interface received. It also shows that writing documents hasn't really changed in the past 30 years. I wonder if that's a good or bad development.
With memory prices skyrocketing, I wonder if we will see a freeze in computer hardware requirements for software. Maybe it's time to optimize again.
Consumer laptops have been frozen on 8GB of RAM for a while already.
Yeah you can get machines which are higher specced easily enough, but they’re usually at the upper end of the average consumers budget.
Sadly Electron developers will be fired, and C++ and even Rust ones will be highly praised. QT5/6 will be king for tons of desktop software.
One can dream.
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I have MS Office 4.0 installed on my 386DX-40 with 4 MB of RAM and 210 MB HDD, running Windows 3.1, and it is good. Most of the common features are there, it's a perfectly working office setup. The major thing missing is font anti-aliasing. Office 95 and 97 are absolutely awesome.
I do remember running Word on an Am386DX-40 and later an i486DX2-66 and there was an issue that wouldn't be a problem with faster hardware; the widow/orphan control happened live so if you made an edit, then hit print, there was a race condition where you could end up with a duplicated line or missing line across page boundaries. Since later drafts tended to have fewer edits, I once turned in a final draft of a school paper with such an error.
Then again, if you'd also run it at low res on an old CRT it might not or barely benefit from anti-aliasing anyway.
Oh, right! 800x600 was pretty sharp on a 14", and 1024x768 on 15", and when ClearType came out it actually was blurring things on CRTs.
Totally agree! I‘d pay definitely $300 (lifetime license) for a productivity suite like Windows 95 design and Office 95 with no bloatware and ads. Just pure speed and productivity.
Last true step change in computer performance for general home computing tasks was SSD.
I'd add multicore processors as well, which makes multiprocess computing viable. And as a major improvement, Apple's desktop CPUs which are both fast, energy efficient and cool - my laptop fan never turns on. At one point I was like "do they even work?" so I ran a website that uses CPU and GPU to the max, and... still nothing, stuff went up to 90 degrees but no fan action yet. I installed a fan control app to demonstrate that my system does in fact have fans.
Meanwhile my home PC starts blowing whenever I fire up a video game.
In 20 years? That is nothing.
> I was playing with it recently in a VM
With the small caveat that I only use Word, it runs perfectly in WINE and has done for over a decade. I use it on 64-bit Ubuntu, and it runs very well: it's also possible to install the 3 service releases that MS put out, and the app runs very quickly even on hardware that is 15+ years old.
The service packs are a good idea. They improve stability, and make export to legacy formats work.
WINE works better than a VM: it takes less memory, there's no VM startup/shutdown time, and host integration is better: e.g. host filesystem access and bidirectional cut and paste.
I had trouble getting the Office 97 installer working with Wine. Not claiming it’s impossible but I figured just to play with it I could spin up Qemu.
It's crazy too to realise how much of the multi-application interop vision was realized in Office 97 too. Visual Basic for Applications had rich hooks into all the apps, you could make macros and scripts and embed them into documents, you could embed documents into each other.
It's really astonishing how full-featured it all was, and it was running on those Pentium machines that had a "turbo" button to switch between 33 and 66 MHz and just a few MBs of RAM.
> but I think it was snappy even in 1998.
It definitely was snappy. I used it on school computers that were Pentium (1?) with about as much RAM as my current L2 cache (16MB). Dirty rectangles and win32 primitives. Very responsive. It also came with VB6 where you could write your own interpreted code very easily to do all kinds of stuff.
The curse-ed ribbon was a huge productivity regression. I still use very old versions of Word and Excel (the latter at least until the odd spreadsheet exceeds size limits) because they're simply better than the newer drivel. Efficient UI, proper keyboard shortcuts with unintrusive habbit-reinforcing hints, better performance, not trying to siphon all my files up to their retarded cloud. There is almost nothing I miss in terms of newer features from later versions.
The ribbon thing was a taste of things to come in the degradation of UI standards. Take something that works great and looks ok, replace it with something flashy that gives marketing people something to say. Break the workflow of existing users. Repeat every 10 years.
This! I have the 14-core M4 Macbook Pro with 48GB of RAM, and Word for Mac (Version 16 at this time) runs like absolute molasses on large documents, and pegs a single core between 70 and 90% for most of the time, even when I'm not typing.
I am now starting to wonder how much of it has to do with network access to Sharepoint and telemetry data that most likely didn't exist in the Office 97 dial-up era.
Features-wise - I doubt there is a single feature I use (deliberately) today in Excel or Word that wasn't available in Office 97.
I'd happily suffer Clippy over Co-Pilot.
> I'd happily suffer Clippy
It's an optional install. You can just click Custom, untick "Office Assistant" and other horrid bits of bloat like "Find Fast" and "Word Mail in Outlook" and get rid of that stuff.
My crappy old 2018 Chromebook is still just about usable with 2GB but has gone from a snappy system to a lethargic snail.. and getting slower every update.. Yeah for progress!
Maybe with the price of memory going up, we'll start seeing a more conservative use of resources in consumer software.
A fella can dream, anyways.
eMMC Chromebooks are notorious for storage-related slowdowns. If it's an option, booting a ChromeOS variant or similar distro off a high-speed microSD, over USB, or (least likely with a Chromebook) via PXE might confirm.
“Powerful enough for productivity tasks” is very variable depending on what you need to be productive in. Office sure. 3D modelling? CAD? Video editing? Ehhhhh not so sure.
I hate to tell you this, but people were doing CAD and CNC work on PCs back when a 33MHz 80386 with 8MB of RAM was an expensive computer.
And they did video editing on Amigas with an add-on peripheral called a Video Toaster.
I don’t know enough about CAD to comment but video editing is considerably more expensive now for a bunch of reasons and I don’t think an Amiga could handle it now.
Video compression is a lot more computationally complex now than it was in the 90s, and it is unlikely that an Amiga with a 68k or old PowerPC would be able to handle 4k video with H265 or ProRes. Even if you had specialized hardware to decode it, I’m not 100% sure that an Amiga has enough memory to hold a single decompressed frame to edit against.
Don’t get me wrong, Video Toaster is super awesome, but I don’t think it’s up to modern tasks.
Except for Internet surfing, a plain Amiga 500 would be good enough for what many folks do at home, between gaming, writing letters, basic accounting and the occasional flyers for party invitations.
Total nostalgia talk. Those machines were just glacially slow at launching apps and really everything, like spell check, go get a coffee. I could immediately tell the difference between a 25Mhz Mac IIci and a 25Mhz Mac IIci with a 32KB cache card. That's how slow they were.
Some of us do actually use such machines every now and then.
The point being made was that for many people whose lives doesn't circle around computers, their computing needs have not changed since the early 1990's, other than doing stuff on Internet nowadays.
For those people, using digital typewriter hardly requires more features than Final Writer, and for what they do with numbers in tables and a couple of automatic updated cells, something like Superplan would also be enough.
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Those machines could be pretty darn fast - if you get one and run the earliest software that still worked on. DOS-based apps would fly on a 486, even as Windows 95 would be barely usable.
Or controlling the heating and AC systems at 19 schools under its jurisdiction using a system that sends out commands over short-wave radio frequencies
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...
it’s also proof that Microsoft hasn’t done much with office in decades… except add bloat, tracking, spyware…
> old Office UI to the ribbon
Truly, I do not miss the swamp of toolbar icons without any labels. I don't weep for the old interface.