Re: [tlug] Re: [OT] Say _no_ to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard

[<burlingk@example.com>]

On Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:35:36 +0900,
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> wrote
In <87hcoeurc7.fsf@example.com>

>
> Josh Glover writes:
>  > Ken Wrote:
>  > > Worse, they are known for producing really nice betas,
>  > 
>  > You must have tried out different betas than I did. ;)
> 
> I'm with Ken.  The last Windows beta I tried was NT 3.1J.  It was
> smooth and much better than Windows 3.11 until it came out of beta, I

Actually, the Win95 beta was gorgeous. ^_^
All umpteen hundred floppies included.

It's multitasking was mediocre by current Windows standards,
but compared to Win 3.11 (even 32s) that was a vast improvement.

FAT16 was still the default FS, so long filenames were a matter
of smoke and mirrors, and extended data, but it was tried and true
and stable.

Trumpet Winsock was the Sockets implementation still.  I think
they were still running the 16 bit code, but it worked better
under Win95 than Win 3.11.

Office and Internet explorer ran great as well.

Then the release day came.  There was a new Winsock implementation.
That was one of the biggest obvious differences.

Trumpet was gone, and Windows was no longer friendly towards it.
Windows had it's first true 32 bit connection, but it was buggy as
hell, and about as friendly.

The new version of Office shipped shortly thereafter on a bright
shiny CD.  CD media was all the rage. :P  No one could afford a
drive yet, and the same package on floppy disk weighed almost
twelve pounds.  (I know that is an exaggeration, but not by much.)

Office was pretty, it had more features than the 3.11 version did,
it used more ram and crashed a lot.  :P  I'm not the only one that
had that experience.  It was not until 98 was installed good and
proper that a lot of people actually updated to Office 95.  Even
then it was because Microsoft was dropping support for the older
software.  But I digress, the issue is OS betas, not office suites. ^_^

The 98 beta was really nice also, right up until they started
releasing release candidates.  Thing things started getting
freaky.  ^^;;


>
> Hrm.  I think I tried 0.99.7 in early '94, but it didn't have X.  Then
> SLS Linux came out in mid-'94, with X.  I moved from that to BOGUS
> Linux, then to Slackware by Jan 1, '95. 
>

Honestly, I started out with the Apple IIe (I think for that version
they
liked to write it ][e).  From there, I moved onto DOS 3.x.  My first
Windowed environment was Windows 3.11, and that hardly counts.  It
Was a pretty way to play solitaire in between running MS-DOS sessions.
:P

The Win32 GUI was always a pain in my rear.  The only useful part in
the long run were the control panel components.  They were useful. :P

For most other things, I would end up opening a command prompt window.

With Windows XP, they made things harder at the command prompt level,
so I am more often forced to do things the GUI way.  I feel myself
getting dumber by the week because of it. ^^;;

With Linux, I am free in most cases to use the GUI where it makes
sense, and go to a console window for the rest. ^_^

---
Ken