It’s hard to believe there was once a world in which Microsoft wasn’t the dominant developer of software for word processing and spreadsheets.
I actually don’t use MS Office much these days, but its presence is ubiquitous.
I like Atlantis for quick documents, saved to RTF format and OpenOffice is my main choice in Linux.
At work we use Pongrass for text editing and I only need Word for opening contributed documents.
There was once a time I didn’t have Word at all.
At the Alpine Times in 1997-98 we typed our articles directly into Pagemaker. I can’t remember what the typesetters did (people who entered sporting results, letters, media releases, etc). They probably used Notepad or something like that.
We also had Lotus Notes. Reporters generally typed their articles in that program before saving them to Pagemaker.
Email was relatively new in those days. Most media releases still came by fax or post.
Lotus Notes back then couldn’t open .doc files. Imagine that!
Once I received a contributed article by email in Word format and had to explain that we couldn’t open it; please resend it as plain text or RTF.
To his credit, the gentleman seemed impressed we weren’t running Windows for everything.
It’s impossible to operate that way today, however.
Lotus Symphony
What prompted this post was the free availability of Lotus Symphony.
I have tried it in Windows before and tonight downloaded the Linux version. It’s a fully featured free word processor based on OpenOffice and the Open Document Format (ODF) with easy conversion to PDF among many other features.
It’s able to save files in .doc format and open them.
The only downside compared with something like Atlantis is the large file size, a massive 455MB in Linux.
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The first non-Commodore 64 word processor I recall using was Multimate. (I’d used one prior to that — in April-May of ’86 — but can’t recall what it was.)
We were WordPerfect users at my next job, though we had an old copy of WordStar (and a PC in the building that booted from floppy-based MS DOS and ran Multimate off a second floppy … the PC had no hard drive… I retired that PC around 1995).
Around then, I was an instructor at a rehab facility and remember when the higher ups talked with local business leaders about whether or not we should move from teaching WordPerfect to Word. At the time the business folk said everybody was still using WordPerfect. (I’m sure they’re teaching office there, now.)
I did some PageMaker work, part-time and when we were expecting our first child, for a local text book publisher. (That was just over 16 years ago. Once in a great while, I’ll pull out PM 6-something to tweak a manual at work.)
All of that to say, “I remember when MS Word had nothing in the way of market share.”
(Ah! I just remembered, the first version of PageMaker I saw came with run-time version of Windows. We tweaked the config.sys file and autoexec.bat to load things in high memory to make it run better.)