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"The .doc file format was also obfuscated,... it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures .... It's hard to imagine a corporation as large and [u
by psn 13y ago
"The .doc file format was also obfuscated,... it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures .... It's hard to imagine a corporation as large and [usually] competently-managed as Microsoft making such a mistake by accident "
They didn't use a binary on-disk format by accident, nor was it a mistake. The folks who wrote word knew that what users would want to open and save files as fast as possible, on hardware thats weak and tiny by today's standards. Going for a format that resulted in the smallest possible files and the fastest possible reads and writes makes sense in those conditions.
- tanzam75 13y agoIndeed, disk transfer speed mattered a great deal in the early days. People used to save all their data to floppy disks, and use their hard disks only to load programs. Say you had a large document of 600 KB size. Floppy drives wrote at 45 KB/second. Imagine waiting 13 seconds for your file to save out. You might save less often -- which means that you ran a correspondingly higher risk of losing data. The .DOC file is a binary format so that it could contain document "sections," with pointers between the sections. This is what made "Fast Save" possible. If you only made a small change to an enormous document, Word would simply append the changes, and then change the pointers in the rest of the document. Instead of waiting 13 seconds, you'd get the save in under a second.