Thoughts of this week’s Cuil.com fiasco sent me into a nostalgic haze. . .
Remember when — — USENET was king, and why would you want to splinter off conversations to a million little websites?
— AltaVista was king?
— AltaVista was destroyed in an attempt to create another portal?
— Alltheweb.com challenged the young Google on the basis of speed?
— floppy discs were, at most, 1.4 megabytes? And that would hold all your Word documents for years?
— When you could cut a notched on the other side of the 5.25″ floppy disc and then write to its backside? Instant double capacity!
— WordPerfect and Word were both in their 5.x releases? Good word processing times right there.
— People might have actually linked to Lycos?
— Zip drives were the future, with their huge 100MB cartridges that would backup your whole hard drive for $10 a pop?
I haven’t used WordPerfect in years, but I always (and still) think that it’s a superior word processing program. Word is consistently trying to second guess me and screw up my spacing and capitalization. I know I can turn off the Auto-Correct, but I that doesn’t seem to help much so that means I have to keep swearing at Word and wishing that my school would get WordPerfect.
I think WordPerfect was the best word processing program I’ve ever used, to this day. And it was DOS-based.
Sadly, too many word processors are trying to be all things to all people, so they all clutter the screen and stink.