Oh! How irritating!
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From: Peter Ceresole on 8 May 2010 07:17 Peter Ceresole <peter(a)cara.demon.co.uk> wrote: > Anne needs Keynote to prepare ppds for her slide lectures. Bah! ppts. -- Peter
From: Ian Piper on 8 May 2010 17:49 On 2010-05-08 12:14:26 +0100, peter(a)cara.demon.co.uk (Peter Ceresole) said: > The only thing that was actually > much better was WordPerfect 3.5. Wonderful. I happily paid for that and > used it for years. But Corel fucked up the Windows version, which was > unbelievably awful, so it died. My first serious word processor was Word Perfect 5.0 (DOS) - I can't recall what I paid for it but it must have been over �200 in the late 80s. I really liked it and sometimes actually feel quite nostalgic for that old white on blue user interface. Those were the days when a program like that came with a 300-page manual! Ian. -- Ian Piper Author of "Learn Xcode Tools for Mac OS X and iPhone Development", Apress, December 2009 Learn more here: http://learnxcodebook.com/� --�
From: Stephen on 8 May 2010 19:03 On 8 May, 22:49, Ian Piper <ianpi...(a)mac.com> wrote: > On 2010-05-08 12:14:26 +0100, pe...(a)cara.demon.co.uk (Peter Ceresole) said: > > > The only thing that was actually > > much better was WordPerfect 3.5. Wonderful. I happily paid for that and > > used it for years. But Corel fucked up the Windows version, which was > > unbelievably awful, so it died. > > My first serious word processor was Word Perfect 5.0 (DOS) - I can't > recall what I paid for it but it must have been over £200 in the late > 80s. I really liked it and sometimes actually feel quite nostalgic for > that old white on blue user interface. Those were the days when a > program like that came with a 300-page manual! > > Ian. > -- > Ian Piper > Author of "Learn Xcode Tools for Mac OS X and iPhone Development", > Apress, December 2009 > Learn more here:http://learnxcodebook.com/ > -- Yup! I grew up with Wordstar myself. Spent a little time using Lotus Manuscript with Freelance for drawings. Big manuals!! The novelty of the Lotus suite then was it had a print preview. What I hate nowadays is the way that some programs once installed rely on an Internet connection for user help and manuals. The number of times I have wanted to be able to work out how to do something, but couldn't because I had no Internet connection at 38,000ft or in some hotel in the back of beyond.
From: Rowland McDonnell on 8 May 2010 20:23 Stephen <srmoll(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Ian Piper <ianpi...(a)mac.com> wrote: > > pe...(a)cara.demon.co.uk (Peter Ceresole) said: > > > > > The only thing that was actually > > > much better was WordPerfect 3.5. Wonderful. I happily paid for that and > > > used it for years. But Corel fucked up the Windows version, which was > > > unbelievably awful, so it died. > > > > My first serious word processor was Word Perfect 5.0 (DOS) - I can't > > recall what I paid for it but it must have been over �200 in the late > > 80s. I really liked it and sometimes actually feel quite nostalgic for > > that old white on blue user interface. Those were the days when a > > program like that came with a 300-page manual! [snip] > Yup! I grew up with Wordstar myself. Spent a little time using Lotus > Manuscript with Freelance for drawings. Big manuals!! The novelty of > the Lotus suite then was it had a print preview. I've never liked wysiwyg WPs. I met LaTeX in 1988 or thereabouts, and never looked back. �200 for MS Word in the late 80s - woo! I had no idea it was so hideously pricey. I was using free software at that time, to smugly produce better quality output than anyone's ever managed from Word. No, that attitude didn't win any friends back then either, but it wasn't meant to: it was meant to stop people trying to get me to solve ALL their bloody computer problems. (actually, I knew Unix sysadmins back then, and tended to get more computer help than I got asked to give...) > What I hate nowadays is the way that some programs once installed rely > on an Internet connection for user help and manuals. The number of > times I have wanted to be able to work out how to do something, but > couldn't because I had no Internet connection at 38,000ft or in some > hotel in the back of beyond. What I hate most of all is that the documentation you can get - if available at all - is usually total bloody rubbish. I met a really good example recently. I've got a digital camera in the house. Panasonic. Borrowed. I've still not managed to work out how to use it to take pictures in an intelligent fashion and we've had it for some weeks now. The camera's got all the latest bells and whistles, but am unhelpful UI, and (worst of all) a manual that makes it nearly impossible to find out what the bloody hell any of the controls actually *do*. The manual tells you the name of each of the controls, and also the names of the operations that they perform. Then you have to do another lookup in the manual to find the meaning of the names of those operations, and then you have to do another lookup to find out what the hell the operation performed actually *is*. And you have to do that multiple times with each function, because they are all defined using terms that are defined in the manual and explained in that distributed fashion. And nowhere is there anything which tells you `how to just use the bloody camera', oh no, nothing like that. `If you want to use <feature X>, do this' and so on. The manual for my Olympus audio recorder is written in *exactly* the same broken fashion. It seems that the skill of technical manual writing has been lost to our civilization. Rowland. -- Remove the animal for email address: rowland.mcdonnell(a)dog.physics.org Sorry - the spam got to me http://www.mag-uk.org http://www.bmf.co.uk UK biker? Join MAG and the BMF and stop the Eurocrats banning biking
From: Stephen on 16 May 2010 08:57 On 8 May, 00:24, Stephen <srm...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I though I had made a cool discovery in my piles of old junk. > > I found a boxed set of "Microsoft Office 4.2 for the Macintosh", with > manuals a pile of 3.5 inch floppies. Guess what? All floppies are > there except disk 1!!!! Arrrgh! What a shame, I though for sure > someone would like to have that! > > Oh! Well! > > Back to more rummaging! Ah! Ha! Found it!! I have a complete boxed set MS Office 4.2 with manuals and seemingly all floppies (30 of them!). The floppies all seem to read OK too. Is it worth something now?
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