Has Productivity Software Improved?

This cer­tainly seems like an appro­pri­ate place for an his­tor­ian to be ;-) Ahh, but so much more, Old­Ver­sion is a web­site that is col­lect­ing links to older ver­sion of main­stream soft­ware applic­a­tions under the prin­ciple that olde ris not always bet­ter. This one just had to hap­pen. I have often thought about how I craved the very first ver­son of Microsoft Word for my 512K Mac. Oh what an excit­ing day when Microsoft intro­duced an indus­trial strength app to put MacWrite to the test. The won­der of this was that the applic­a­tion fit on a single 400K micro floppy (as they were tech­nic­ally referred to). If you had the single 400K drive you were sub­ject to end­less swap­ping of the sys­tem disk and the applic­a­tion disk, but oh, the power of the applic­a­tion and I restate…all on a 400K floppy. Now of course the aver­age install of MS Word is some­where in the range of 400Mb…and you know… that little 400K app had 80% of the every­day func­tion­al­ity of the bloat­ware we use today. This is all to say that I heart­ily agree that newer is not always bet­ter and a site that offer us the oppor­tun­ity to use com­pact, effi­cient apps before they lost sight if what they were designed to accom­plished is a very good thing.

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