Word 5.1 Plus
I got wired
yesterday with a refrain I hear often: Word 5.1 was the epitome of word
processing on the Macintosh. And, I have to say, it’s not as though this isn’t
something we’ve considered over the years. We’ve even mocked up a couple of
versions of Word to play around with.
But, here’s the rub. If you sit down with a bunch of people and ask them
what they want in a word processor, they start from Word 5.1 as the baseline,
but they’ll, almost always, want something more. Maybe it’s Word 5.1 plus
background spell checking. Maybe it’s Word 5.1 plus scriptability. Maybe it’s
Word 5.1 plus Unicode support. Maybe it’s Word 5.1 plus AutoText. For others
still, it’s Word 5.1, but, by the way, we’d also like you to support Win Word’s
file format natively—including nested tables. And, gosh, when I get a
document from Win Word users, it’d be nice if you got the line breaks and the
page breaks the same.
What the vast majority of people want is Word 5.1 Plus. And, by the time
you add up all the “Plus’s” you come to something that’s not all that far away
from Word 2004, which is how we got here in the first place. I can still hear
the refrains from 1991 that went something like, “When are we going to get
[fill in your favorite feature here]?” You’d have a hard time convincing me
that, had we stopped at Word 5.1, someone else wouldn’t have eaten our lunch a
long time ago.
Of course it is possible to find some folks who still prefer just Word 5.1,
and I wouldn’t even be surprised to find that this group numbers in the
thousands—which is pretty close to the number of copies of Word 2004 that
we sold, in various configurations, on the first day that it was available for
purchase.
Rick
Comments
Anonymous
June 18, 2004
To me that article, and the linked comments at MacInTouch reflected those people's nostalgia more than anything. Their memories of the older product are suffused with a rosy glow, kind of like the people who fondly remember a time when it was safe to walk the streets, children were respectful of their elders and so on, none of it is true but the rosy glow keeps the bad things out of focus.
Now if you ask me, I'd like to see the Computer Concepts product Impression Style as the basis of future Word Processors ;)Anonymous
June 18, 2004
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June 18, 2004
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June 18, 2004
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June 18, 2004
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June 19, 2004
The short live OpenDoc applications offered the building block concept of customizing your word processor. If IBM would have done its part to offer OpenDoc for Windows then it may have gained some traction. Then again Jobs didn't like it for some reason and killed it at Apple.Anonymous
June 19, 2004
Close but not quite, Word 4.0e was the best. The revision "e" was what let it work on Quadras & PowerPCs. Word 5.1 was slower and had lots of stupid menus (like Windows has) added that wasted lots of screen space - something that mattered back in the day when a 13" RGB was considered a decent sized display. Word 4.0e also fit on one 800k floppy. By comparison, 5.1 was bloated and fit on 5 or 6 1.4 MB HD floppys. I consider it a transition to the worst Word of all, Word 6.
It was the beginning of the bloat.
There was nothing added to Word 5.1 that enabled anything that I couldn't do already with Word 4.0.
plazAnonymous
June 19, 2004
>I'm sure most people don't use 90% of the features Word has.
The oft-quoted figure is closer to 80%, but when researchers actually check they find that it's never the same 80%. I may only find 20% important, and so may you, but yours and mine very likely don't overlap much. So now maybe 30% is "important." Keep adding people and the "what's important" scope grows.Anonymous
June 19, 2004
I'm sure one of the reasons Word 5.1 is remembered so fondly is because of how jaw droppingly bad Word 6 was...Anonymous
June 19, 2004
I won't really gripe about the size of the current package, since to even a G4 it loads pretty fast. I will say, however, that the day I left the law office I'd worked at for six years with Word 5.1, I had an iMac 400 on my desk and it booted Word 5.1 in about 3 seconds.
I did everything we needed. We had multi-part, multi-section legal documents which required rigorous formatting.
Word 6 came out while I was at that office. Based upon a short trial which showed a) horrendous slowness and b) Word doing too many things for me that I'd rather do manually, I recommended against an upgrade.
I keep in touch with them still. They finally updated to Office v.X last year.
Currently, I use a G4 MDD at the office, a G5 at home and a TiBook 400 in between. WP of choice?
TextEdit.
I can still make Word 5.1 sit up, roll over, beg and jump, but then I'd have to load Classic. Word 5.1, as it was, would be all I'd need if it were able to run in Mac OS X.
...and I still don't get why these things are so big. What is it that's fundamentally different from "Magic Desk" on my C64?Anonymous
June 19, 2004
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June 20, 2004
Word 6 was extremely bad, but one important thing for us to remember as Microsoft's customers is the powerful MS reality distortion field which caused them to insist that there were no problems with Word 6 when it came out. Instead, we got treated to a spiel about the greatness of "core code" and how the Windowsness of Word 6 was really a feature.
The company is quite similar to Quark in its attitude towards customers.Anonymous
June 25, 2004
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July 02, 2004
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July 28, 2004
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October 01, 2007
"I want Word 5.1, plus my ten favourite features ... "Anonymous
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