3 ms·

> Is an old late-'90s version of Microsoft Word that could run on a machine with 4MB of RAM really a thousand times better than one from today that requires 4GB

by abxytg 4y ago

> Is an old late-'90s version of Microsoft Word that could run on a machine with 4MB of RAM really a thousand times better than one from today that requires 4GB? 100,000x even. Obviously yes! Even the web -- the things the higher resource caps enable are unbelievable. Yes bottom feeding news sites are worse for it, boo hoo. Have you see the shit you can do in a web browser today? On any device? It's so, so, so much cooler and better than anything the 90s had.

mysterydip 4y ago
I'm really curious what the "killer features" are of present-day Word compared to, say, Word 97.
- icedchai 4y ago
  Pretty much none. I used Word 97 well into the early 2000's. In the early 90's, my Amiga ran a decent word processor in 1 meg of RAM. Software expands to consume whatever resources are available: memory, disk, CPU, bandwidth...
- pixl97 4y ago
  It may be a different answer than you expect... A lot less developer time spent making sure the application fit in a tiny amount of memory. Of course that sucks for you as a user when an application takes up 4+GB of memory for no reason (I'm looking at you Teams). But for the company that writes it, it is great. Compile and ship, no more weeks or months of trying to shave off every bit so you can fit this in 16MB of RAM, or on just a few floppies. You have a big customer that will sign a 10 million+ contract if you add feature X? Sorry, no way to make that work in under 105KB, which means we can't ship it.
- someweirdperson 4y ago
  It saves when the user wants to, not automatically without asking, saving even unintended accidential changes, and publishing them to others. It runs locally, not rendering badly in the browser. Saving to disk does not require navigation through 3 sub-menues.
  - Cyberdog 4y ago
    > It runs locally, not rendering badly in the browser. Not sure what you mean by this one - Word '97 didn't run in a browser either. As for your other two features, I still don't see those as a 1000-fold improvement.
- abxytg 4y ago
  Here's one -- cloud saves! Remember carrying floppies? How about real time collaborative editing? All the above cross platform? C'mon now be realistic :).

by abxytg 4y ago

mysterydip 4y ago

I'm really curious what the "killer features" are of present-day Word compared to, say, Word 97.

icedchai 4y ago
Pretty much none. I used Word 97 well into the early 2000's. In the early 90's, my Amiga ran a decent word processor in 1 meg of RAM. Software expands to consume whatever resources are available: memory, disk, CPU, bandwidth...
pixl97 4y ago
It may be a different answer than you expect... A lot less developer time spent making sure the application fit in a tiny amount of memory. Of course that sucks for you as a user when an application takes up 4+GB of memory for no reason (I'm looking at you Teams). But for the company that writes it, it is great. Compile and ship, no more weeks or months of trying to shave off every bit so you can fit this in 16MB of RAM, or on just a few floppies. You have a big customer that will sign a 10 million+ contract if you add feature X? Sorry, no way to make that work in under 105KB, which means we can't ship it.
someweirdperson 4y ago
It saves when the user wants to, not automatically without asking, saving even unintended accidential changes, and publishing them to others. It runs locally, not rendering badly in the browser. Saving to disk does not require navigation through 3 sub-menues.
- Cyberdog 4y ago
  > It runs locally, not rendering badly in the browser. Not sure what you mean by this one - Word '97 didn't run in a browser either. As for your other two features, I still don't see those as a 1000-fold improvement.
abxytg 4y ago
Here's one -- cloud saves! Remember carrying floppies? How about real time collaborative editing? All the above cross platform? C'mon now be realistic :).