5 ms·
> The old .doc format was never "a dump of Word's working memory", implying copy of raw bytes. It's rather Word's internal object graph serialized into COM Stru
by lloeki 4y ago
> The old .doc format was never "a dump of Word's working memory", implying copy of raw bytes. It's rather Word's internal object graph serialized into COM Structured Storage
Probably the "dump of Word's working memory" part emanates from Word for DOS, which predates COM by the order of a decade.
- Lammy 4y agoIt's something people have been parroting ever since this Spolsky post from 2008 https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-microsoft-office-file-formats-so-complicated-and-some-workarounds/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
- canucker2016 4y agoMacWord 3.0+ (and then WinWord 1.1+) had fast-save which leaned on the in-memory piece-table data structure to write to disk only the changes to the Word document. see https://web.archive.org/web/20160308183811/http://1017.songtrellisopml.com/whatsbeenwroughtusingpiecetables https://web.archive.org/web/20160308183811/http://1017.songt... The COM structured storage Office file format came from OLE2 (object linking and embedding - one of the mid-90s must-have features)