There’s an interesting short article on Low-End Mac about how the author uses an Apple Lisa for his writing tasks. He cites the fact that he can turn it off and resume exactly where he was by turning it back on, not having to worry about either saving documents or power outages. More importantly he reminds us to consider whether all the bells and whistles of the latest greatest productivity appas are things we actually use. I blogged earlier on this point and was comparing Word 1.0 on the Mac to the current incarnation. Without being some neo-Luddite and pretending like the older technology is that far superior, I think that there are points to be made for simple and fast.
Nonetheless, its not quite that black and white. I have tried to find an alternative word processor for use under Windows with less baggage than Word. I have been unsuccessful. Both AbiWord and OpenOffice seem as bloated and frankly try to emulate Word at the expense of actually thinking about how the human actual processes words. Admittedly there are a few challengers of note on OSX. But, what about starting with TextEdit or the like and simply being able to modularly add features as desired.
One of the other points raised relates to the concept that some tasks haven’t been improved upon by faster processors and the like. Word processing can get away with the older 68K…frankly given the choice, I would actually be very happy doing my word processing on one of the NeXT boxes and WriteNow. That was (and still is) speed with an awesomely crisp display. Pure monochrome (I have little need for colour when word processing) and a joy to the eyes. strangely far less eye candy than OSX has become bloated with. A purpose built word processing engine. I should crank up the old NeXT laser printer and see if it still works as well.
As to the age of the machine we use…think about that for a sec – a twenty four year old computer. And its not the oldest working ones about…alas, it seems like just yesterday.
Update: The pondering is usually good enough to get me exploring. In this case I happened upon PolyEdit from Russian publisher PolySoft. They have a tiny 1.3Mb word processor that reads and writes .docs and seems to have a rather robust feature set, yet runs like a wee demon. I’ll post comments if my trial goes well. So far so good.
Further Update: Well, if I didn’t need footnotes or endnotes I’d be doing well, unfortunately PolyEdit has neither. Additionally, while it will import Word 2000/XP/2003 versions, it will only save as Word v6. Pity. Its super fast and does offer a wide variety of features and the interface really works.
Great post. I’m much afraid of upgrading to anything past Office 2000 as this one is running slow enough as it is. I’d love to use something more barebones (though as you say, a footnote engine is important). Would one have to know a lot of code to set margins, indents, spacing, etc., with Lisa or other older programs? I got into word processing with Word Perfect 5…
Josh
You’d by amazed at how far ahead of its time LisaWrite was. No codes…it was GUI as you know today. One of the great innovations as far as I was concerned was the concept of a vertical ruler as well as a horizontal one. PolyEdit is fast, but the developer says that although references will be added eventually, bot in the near future. Rats.