Jeff Matthews Posted March 10, 2015 Author Share Posted March 10, 2015 I seem to remember that in 1987-88 (when I first started using PC's), Word Perfect was quite expensive - like in the $500 range. What am I missing? Was there a Pro version, or something? P.S. I remember laser printers (with really the original HP LaserJet being the only consumer-grade model on the market) costing around $2,000+. Those puppies were a luxury item. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mallette Posted March 10, 2015 Share Posted March 10, 2015 Both were quite expensive Never paid over 100.00 bucks for Lantastic and it worked immediately. Novell was exclusively enterprise. People didn't have computers at home, much less networks. Windows networking was a nightmare for several integrations and still is problematic. I don't know how involved you were with computer infrastructure in 1990, but I was already 10 years deep. Conversion to MS networking was a buggy nightmare, and the cost in fighting the issues certainly made any savings evaporate rapidly. As to software costs, at the time you BOUGHT software. You could install as many as you wished perfectly legally as it was the same as buying a book. It was illegal to sell it or give copies to someone else or another business, but you could do as you wish with your own copy just as with books, recordings, and such. And, as you can see above, there was a LOT of choice. The locking down through legislation and WIPO, CONFU, and the like left it easy to create the monopolies we have now. As you know, it's the kind of law that send Mark into apoplexy. Now, we no longer question that software isn't going to work unless it can talk to big brother with all the blessings that brings. Anyway, keep enjoying all these modern "innovations." I still have enough leftover concepts waiting the power and stability to re-invent to get me to retirement. We still have our well kept secret compiler that allows us to do things that were once common, but few know how to do anymore. Average cost of a crappy, once size fits nobody enterprise .NET based LMS system for a company our size is 150,000 and 50,000 a year "maintenance" and is browser based, fer cryin' out loud. We just built our own far more capable system that does stuff you can't get from these people at any price by ignoring the "don't try this at home" propaganda. Never fear. Those of us of the early days are disappearing rapidly and the generations now used to BSODs and forced OS migrations every 3 year business cycle are the rule...as we can see here. Do I miss the old days when anything was possible? Yes. Do I live in the real world? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean I've drunk the Kool-Aid and believe everything I am told, nor can I swallow that it really takes a 100 gbyte system disk to be productive. Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mallette Posted March 10, 2015 Share Posted March 10, 2015 P.S. I remember laser printers (with really the original HP LaserJet being the only consumer-grade model on the market) costing around $2,000+. Those puppies were a luxury item That is very true. We were paying 2500.00 for 300dpi laser printers at NUS. We bought a dye sublimation color printer that used a LOAD of liquid chemicals that had to be used up in a few months that cost 125,000. Results were excellent but highly complicated and not as good as the large format Epson in my printer room at the moment that cost about 500.00. That drop happened really fast. Think I got my first Epson color inkjet about 1995 or six and thought there was nothing left to invent. Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Matthews Posted March 10, 2015 Author Share Posted March 10, 2015 nor can I swallow that it really takes a 100 gbyte system disk to be productive. Of course, it doesn't. But what it allowed was pretty neat. What things can you do with 100 gbytes that you can't do with 640k? I can think of a few. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marvel Posted March 10, 2015 Share Posted March 10, 2015 (edited) I seem to remember that in 1987-88 (when I first started using PC's), Word Perfect was quite expensive - like in the $500 range. What am I missing? Was there a Pro version, or something? The chart is for Windows implementations, hence WP starting around 1991 or so. Plus, those prices are as received by vendors. Retail cost would have been higher. The original HP and Apple laser printers used the Canon print engine. We got a Mac 512 and Apple Laserwriter at the little weekly paper where I worked. The 300 dpi was fine for burning negatives for plates to go to newsprint. That alone kept the wolves away for a number of years for small, weekly publishers. Compared to photo typesetting, this stuff was pennies... Edited March 10, 2015 by Marvel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mallette Posted March 10, 2015 Share Posted March 10, 2015 What things can you do with 100 gbytes that you can't do with 640k? I can think of a few. A few. And you are confusing RAM with storage. DOS was only a few 100kb and with a task switcher/clipboard service like Software Carousel I say 90% of users wouldn't notice a thing. Nobody will say, probably because they really don't have a clue, but I suspect we'd all be shocked at how small Windows re-written from the ground up would be. I am guessing not much over 100mb, based on Win98SE installing in that size in "compact" mode. I am sure there was something it couldn't do but I don't recall it. Had networking, ODBC, etc, etc. I am no engineer, but as I recall paging is a peculiar requirement of the rather backward Intel CPU spec that goes back to the 640k barrier, HIMEM.SYS and all that stuff that was totally obsolete even in the 90s compared to Motorola CPUs (which are still used in a lot of military stuff). Since these had, and still don't have, an MMU they had to have a way to work in non-contiguous memory. An MMU equipped CPU did this via hardware and simply allocated as required, then vacated when a program exited. It's one of the reasons such computers could be shut down like God intended...with a power switch rather than a "Start" button. Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mallette Posted March 10, 2015 Share Posted March 10, 2015 Compared to photo typesetting, this stuff was pennies... Fer shure...we had a Lisa at the A/V facility at Sheppard AFB in the late 70s. We though it was downright miraculous. And, it was. Computype or something like that took up the breach between Lisa...which had issues...and the Mac. But it was what Apple learned about typesetting from the Lisa that allowed the Mac to take over the publishing world. Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marvel Posted March 10, 2015 Share Posted March 10, 2015 (edited) Those of us of the early days are disappearing rapidly and the generations now used to BSODs and forced OS migrations every 3 year business cycle are the rule...as we can see here. I can't recall the last time I have had a DSOD, and I do support on close to 450 Windows computers. I am no engineer, but as I recall paging is a peculiar requirement of the rather backward Intel CPU spec I don't think that has been used for quite a number of years, has it? Bruce Edited March 10, 2015 by Marvel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mallette Posted March 10, 2015 Share Posted March 10, 2015 I don't think that has been used for quite a number of years, has it? Bruce, I am getting on shaky ground delving into these areas. Paging and VM are both related to the shortcomings of the x86 architecture, mainly the lack of an MMU. Its a major performance hit. Even the fastest SSD still isn't in the RAM speed range. Further, it isn't very "virtual." More like just storage as it has to be accessed a "page" at time and so there has to be a physical place in RAM for the whole page available contiguously. Drive space CAN be used as physical memory. We had a program called "GigaRAM" back in the 90s where you allocated a block of a hard drive to it, however much you wanted, and it made it identical to RAM in every way but speed. It's interface listed your installed programs and you could tell it to use only physical memory, or physical memory and then VM, or VM and then physical memory, or VM only. Mindblowing to have a gig or more of RAM available when Windows was still stuck in 640k addressable. Of course, things would slow down a LOT...but the main thing was you could actually do things otherwise impossible. Such a program could not, to my knowledge, work on the creaky Intel CPU architecture. Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Matthews Posted March 10, 2015 Author Share Posted March 10, 2015 Such a program could not, to my knowledge, work on the creaky Intel CPU architecture. What do you mean? They still use swap drives. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mallette Posted March 10, 2015 Share Posted March 10, 2015 They still use swap drives. If by "they," you mean MS, yes they do. Biggest hit on performance in that OS and the source of a lot of the BSODs...as well as the reason you can't simply turn it off. With an MMU of the type implemented on the Motorola 68020 and forward (it was separate before then) there would be no issues with contiguous memory and with the cheap RAM we have no need for the paging that is the source of so much pain. And, you could use REAL VM that was not distinguishable from RAM by the OS. Not sure if Bruce will remember, but in the 90s you HAD to run a third party memory management software if you did anything remotely taxing on a Windows machine or you be crashing multiple times a day. They got better at it...but it remains an throwback architecture and won't be fixed because even when those of us in the programming and heavy load segment had such a helluva time with it MS didn't care because your average office machine with basic software ran adequately enough such that business didn't care. I don't know why it's so hard to explain that MS has NEVER been about innovation. It's been about snagging and holding the big business sector. That is why my respect for Gates is so high. He's one of the greatest of the robber barons, who also were about seizing and hold a market and not giving a hoot in hell about the average consumer. Ever ask yourself where the smaller, agile, stable, reliable home OS at a reasonable price that boots fast from chip and is therefore basically invulnerable to virus is from MS? Don't hold your breath. They don't care. Let them eat enterprise and keep those security updates and all those third party AV firms happy. Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mallette Posted March 10, 2015 Share Posted March 10, 2015 They still use swap drives. One other thing...I am open to correction but I'd never heard of VM or a swap drive until MS. My first reaction was "WTF?" Still is... Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paducah Home Theater Posted March 11, 2015 Share Posted March 11, 2015 (edited) What huge improvements do you see in Office to need to have changed the file type to "x?" The ribbon? The docx file format. Changing to xml has really done wonders in the ability to (1) allow other software programs to open, read and convert to/from Word, and (2) allow developers to write programs which manipulate Word documents. Like I said earlier, there are likely many things which are improvements that only a small segment of the population knows exists or understands. But you can rest assured that this small segment is quietly doing other things to make your life easier which you will not fully appreciate or recognize. Before we had docx, we had rtf. Even rtf was not first. I don't know what preceded it. Whatever the case, docx opened Word to the world in many other ways. It used to be that architectures like that were not well-documented in the public literature and essentially were proprietary, keeping the system "closed." By going to docx, the architecture is more open, and as a result, there are, among many other things out there, a lot of plug-ins available. Eh, kinda sorta mostly. It's quite a bit more complicated in some ways though. This is actually my day job, I write and maintain multiple programs that read office documents. Used to I had a nice little object library via a direct line to Excel that I could easily do most anything to an Excel in a pretty straightforward manner. Of course it was proprietary but it was also intuitive. When they "fixed" it with .xlsx, maybe I had more power, but in many ways it kinda sucked due to complexity. It's kind of the same in many ways though. Also, that xml didn't really fix the proprietary issues. Take xml from a word document and try to run it in embedded html in Chrome and some real funky stuff can happen. It is set up in such a way that this isn't just possible but seemingly encouraged. People think they're pasting plain text from Word but in the background it's pasting a bunch of crazy xml. It drives me nuts is what it does. Edited March 11, 2015 by MetropolisLakeOutfitters Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Matthews Posted March 11, 2015 Author Share Posted March 11, 2015 (edited) What huge improvements do you see in Office to need to have changed the file type to "x?" The ribbon? The docx file format. Changing to xml has really done wonders in the ability to (1) allow other software programs to open, read and convert to/from Word, and (2) allow developers to write programs which manipulate Word documents. Like I said earlier, there are likely many things which are improvements that only a small segment of the population knows exists or understands. But you can rest assured that this small segment is quietly doing other things to make your life easier which you will not fully appreciate or recognize. Before we had docx, we had rtf. Even rtf was not first. I don't know what preceded it. Whatever the case, docx opened Word to the world in many other ways. It used to be that architectures like that were not well-documented in the public literature and essentially were proprietary, keeping the system "closed." By going to docx, the architecture is more open, and as a result, there are, among many other things out there, a lot of plug-ins available. Eh, kinda sorta mostly. It's quite a bit more complicated in some ways though. This is actually my day job, I write and maintain multiple programs that read office documents. Used to I had a nice little object library via a direct line to Excel that I could easily do most anything to an Excel in a pretty straightforward manner. Of course it was proprietary but it was also intuitive. When they "fixed" it with .xlsx, maybe I had more power, but in many ways it kinda sucked due to complexity. It's kind of the same in many ways though. Also, that xml didn't really fix the proprietary issues. Take xml from a word document and try to run it in embedded html in Chrome and some real funky stuff can happen. It is set up in such a way that this isn't just possible but seemingly encouraged. People think they're pasting plain text from Word but in the background it's pasting a bunch of crazy xml. It drives me nuts is what it does. So, what kinds of things do you do? Your description is right as regards the fact that Word xml does not mean Word documents will render in your browser. That was not the point. However, the xml does allow you to get in and do some pretty cool stuff. Sure, you could always do it before in other ways, but as I understand it, the xml has essentially turned the architecture into open source. Here's an example: http://docx.codeplex.com/ Edited March 11, 2015 by Jeff Matthews Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marvel Posted March 11, 2015 Share Posted March 11, 2015 Paging and VM are both related to the shortcomings of the x86 architecture, mainly the lack of an MMU. Almost every architecture uses these, but the larger issue for MS-DOS and early versions of Windows (as an added layer on DOS), was the segmented architecture of the Intel CPUs. While those modes still exist on Intel processors, almost no one uses them. "x86-64 is a 64-bit extension of x86 that almost entirely removes segmentation in favor of the flat memory model used by almost all operating systems for the 386 or newer processors. In long mode, all segment offsets are ignored, except for the FS and GS segments. When used with 4 KB pages, the page table tree has four levels instead of three." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paducah Home Theater Posted March 11, 2015 Share Posted March 11, 2015 (edited) So, what kinds of things do you do? I wrote one of the more popular turn-key intranet solutions that is geared towards banks. So there's lots of things that require Office interaction. Importing timesheets and employee lists from third party timekeeping programs that use Excel for exports, digging around in Outlook and importing contacts an appointments, trying to programmatically clean up or block XML pastes from Word, using Excel as a form and importing reports from various business processes into a database, etc. Too many projects to list. Lots of import operations though, mostly with Excel. Edited March 11, 2015 by MetropolisLakeOutfitters Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
seti Posted March 11, 2015 Share Posted March 11, 2015 Microsoft needs to wake up and feel the ship sinking. They need to start work on the next great operating system because 8 and 10 ain't it and ain't close. Crap+++ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mallette Posted March 11, 2015 Share Posted March 11, 2015 They need to start work on the next great operating system because 8 and 10 ain't it and ain't close. Crap+++ Shucks, seti. Many consider it state of the art... Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tigerwoodKhorns Posted March 11, 2015 Share Posted March 11, 2015 They need to start work on the next great operating system because 8 and 10 ain't it and ain't close. Crap+++ Shucks, seti. Many consider it state of the art... Dave MS Windowns definately is state of the art. Unfortunately, this is the state that the art is in. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mallette Posted March 11, 2015 Share Posted March 11, 2015 (edited) Unfortunately, this is the state that the art is in. Sigh...you are correct, sir. Fact is that I fully understand the rather unique in technology/business history that wound up with the public being force fed this system and there being no competition. We ARE stuck with it. The NBT is probably well off but I think I have identified it: MUCH greater bandwidth at home that will allow developers to build all sorts of programs that run on servers and can be accessed and used where you rent both the application and the CPU and latency is within that we have now on our own machine. Back to the Future again...the dumb terminal returns. TBHWY, I can see promise in that. At least entrepreneurs wouldn't be forced into a "one size fits nobody" GUI with a lot of constraints. Probably after my time... Dave Edited March 11, 2015 by Mallette Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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