Your favorite word processor?

[CC_333]

This reminds me how much I hate the lack of consistency in identifying software versions.  Used to be by version, then the trend started where they used the year and then some reverted to version numbers again.  Or you might have software that goes by year but also version number and then some people talk about the version number and others use the year and then you have to figure out whether they are two different versions or the same.  And, oy.  It's like, once someone builds a working time machine, someone needs to go back in time and find the first person to come up with using years instead of versions and slap them silly and say "NO!"

Yeah, it can be confusing.

Internally, I think Word 98 could be thought of as "Word 7.x" and Word 2001 "Word 8.x", if that clears it up any?

"98" and "2001" are, therefore, mostly marketing terms.  Such seemed to be popular back then (perhaps we can blame Microsoft for it, for one of the earliest and most conspicuous large scale uses of the year as a version seems to be Windows 95 (aka Windows 4.00.950) released in, ahem, 1995.

c

 

[LaPorta]

...except that there WAS a Word 7...I think 98 came after it, if I am not mistaken.

 

[Cory5412]

WOrd 6 for Mac is the version that directly precedes Officd 98.

To make this better, Word/Excel/PowerPoint of a specific generation each have different version numbers, or at least they did at that point. Office 4 for Mac consisted of Word 6, Excel 5 and PowerPoint 4, which is arguably worse than calling them all by the year they were released, or in Adobe's case, Adobe [program] [CSversion] (or now: CC[year]).

Incidentally:

The other thing that came up recently was a suggestion I poke at Nisus Writer. It's neat, seems to work okay, I've got 4.1.6 on some of my system 7 machines and 6.5 on one of my 9 machines. It's a bit more sprightly than Office 98, by nature of, at least being more efficient. 4 runs on 68ks and I think is a bit older than 98, which helps on pre-G3 PowerPC and 68k systems. I found the styling controls but it seems like it separates text styling and paragraph styling in a way that's not fully intuitive to me.

 

[CC_333]

...except that there WAS a Word 7...I think 98 came after it, if I am not mistaken.

Sheesh!  I wonder why they couldn't have a more straightforward versioning scheme?

c

 

[Cory5412]

To the best of my knowledge, there was not a Word 7 for Mac.

Interestingly, Microsoft skipped the version number "7" for Mac entirely. Word 98 for Mac was given the version number 8.5, to match Word 98 for PC. (Where Word 95 was 7.0, and 97 was 8.0.)

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word#Release_history 

A couple years later, Adobe collectivized all its versions under the "CS #" banner, which meant finding the "matching" versions was a bit easier.

In terms of why companies pick to do this? Some of it's trend-chasing (and 1995+ "thing $YEAR" was EXTREMELY popular) and some of it's that almost nobody has a good idea of how to really do product/version numbering or naming.

Companies miss the mark on naming schemes all the time. Apple had enough products in this era that 1400 through 9600 was barely enough to sanely manage them, and even then, you had things like 6100 -> 7200 -> 7300 vs. 7100 -> 7500 -> 7600 and then the 6200 -> 6300 -> 6360 coming into existence, alongside the 6400 and 4400.

There's also the MacWrite -> MacWrite Pro scenario where MacWrite made it up to a certain version number and then got replaced with MacWritePro, which happened to MacDraw, MacPaint, and FileMaker as well, except to make this better, the FileMaker versioning was continous.

And then, Claris had this cool habit of doing Version #.#v#, so, like, I"m probably using MacWritePro 1.4v3 and I have Organizer 2.1v2 or something like that on my system, which, you know, makes any kind of sense. (And this is when the parent company was deep into x.y.z versions.

(Then, there was that twenty years Apple spent naming their OS after cats, then places in California, and expected people to remember the order of them.)

Not to say that any of these makes more or less sense, just, they're all there.

 

[techknight]

I used Word 6 on 68040 and 68030 machines, and it had issues keeping up with typing and was a bit pokey overall. Word 5 was great though. 

Running word 6 on a PPC improved the experience quite a bit, in my recollection. 

 

[jessenator]

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word#Release_history 

Word 5 was great though.

I'd prefer the citation on Word version 5 from the Wikipedia article to be from actual Microsoft documentation, because it appears that v5.x (Office for Macintosh v3) was the last 68k version, and yet v6 has an 020 as minimum… so which is it, Wikipedia, 5 or 6?  I need to know… /s

Again, I repeat myself, but I'd like official docs from Microsoft and not an opinion blog for citations, but that's another discussion altogether.

***

In my high school days, with a $10 Macintosh Plus, I wrote many papers (probably) with Microsoft Word 4—it would've been the 800k floppy *ahem* borrowed from the IT team office boneyard. That's the most likely scenario, anyway. I did have SCSI HDD for it and could've transferred a different version to it.

There's a slim chance it was, or soon became ClarisWorks, though, because the family Performa had it as well as a US Letter capable printer—teachers stopped accepting my ImageWriter tractor paper dimensions

 

[techknight]

I'd prefer the citation on Word version 5 from the Wikipedia article to be from actual Microsoft documentation, because it appears that v5.x (Office for Macintosh v3) was the last 68k version, and yet v6 has an 020 as minimum… so which is it, Wikipedia, 5 or 6?  I need to know… /s

Again, I repeat myself, but I'd like official docs from Microsoft and not an opinion blog for citations, but that's another discussion altogether.

***

In my high school days, with a $10 Macintosh Plus, I wrote many papers (probably) with Microsoft Word 4—it would've been the 800k floppy *ahem* borrowed from the IT team office boneyard. That's the most likely scenario, anyway. I did have SCSI HDD for it and could've transferred a different version to it.

There's a slim chance it was, or soon became ClarisWorks, though, because the family Performa had it as well as a US Letter capable printer—teachers stopped accepting my ImageWriter tractor paper dimensions

Confused.... Not sure what you mean. but Word 6 ran on 68K. 

 

[jessenator]

Word 6 ran on 68k

I figured as much based on the fact you said you used it

I was commenting on Wikipedia's notes from LEM that contradict itself:
Unless I'm not reading it correctly, that is. …which now looking at it I am. Oops. "Last version to support 68000-based Macs" okay, I read that as "680x0", my bad :/

 

[Unknown_K]

Does AMI Pro for Windows 3.1 count?

 

[Garrett]

I know I've responded to this thread before, but I've been using my vintage Macs for writing a lot lately, so my preference has become more definitive. 

On the vintage Macs, I love using Word 4.0. When I got the Classic working, I mostly used MacWrite. But I find Word 4.0 somewhat easier to use and more powerful as it has a lot of nice tools, like a built-in spell checker and word count. I can also convert Word 4.0 files to RTF files and open them on my modern Mac with no issues. I've actually written a couple posts on my personal blog using Word 4.0 on my Classic and SE.

On my modern Mac, I bounce between Microsoft Word and Google Docs. My university has subscribed to the "Google school" model and therefore a lot of documents are shared through Google Docs or Google Slides. Google Docs is far better in the collaboration department, but I like using Word when it's something that I won't be collaborating with others on or for personal things.

Tangent: I actually am debating on whether to publish a "throwback Thursday" post for my personal blog about my "obsession" with Microsoft Office as a kid. In elementary school I had to use open-source word processors due to not having access to Microsoft Office at home. It was annoying, especially since many of the formats didn't play nice with Word 2003 at school. As silly as it sounds, I was ecstatic when I finally got Microsoft Office 2003... in 2011. Reason I'm thinking about not publishing that post is it's long and just sounds so silly... but was true. I actually wrote that post in Word 4.0 on the Classic.

 

[olePigeon]

If I remember correctly, you can put the Word 6 format extension thingy in Word 5, and be able to open and export as Word 6.

 

[techknight]

I figured as much based on the fact you said you used it

I was commenting on Wikipedia's notes from LEM that contradict itself:View attachment 39184
Unless I'm not reading it correctly, that is. …which now looking at it I am. Oops. "Last version to support 68000-based Macs" okay, I read that as "680x0", my bad :/

Now that makes sense. Word 5 was the last one that ran on 68000 only macs. 

 

[trag]

Still a warm place in my heart for WordStar on CPM...

 

[register]

Since around 1990, my favourite text processor is a DTP software system called »RagTime«. Version 3.2 became freely available as of September 5th, 1998, and is a perfect match for most 68k Macs, with full support for many goodies implemented in System 7.1. Nowadays you will find RagTime 3.2 easily in the usual places and share it legally. If your goal is to make professional quality pages for print with reasonable system requirements on a classic Mac, try RagTime 3.2. It will run on systems up to 9.2.2. The improved later versions do still open old RagTime files. The current Version is RagTime 6.6, available for Mac OS and Windows 10 (free 30 days trial).

Hint 1: If you want to try this, be sure to firstly have a look at the manual, just to get an impression what functionality to expect from the software.

Hint 2: While I consider M$ Office as a plague on a biblical scale, in some cases it can be useful to have a copy of Word alongside RagTime, just to make use of its admittedly superior options to build a text draft structured in chapters. It is possible to do that structuring in Word and import that text into a RagTime file to use the outstanding layout and typesetting capabilities in RagTime.

However, If you want a lightweight, speedy text-only application, you might try BBEdit. It speaks for the quality of this little gem, that it is still further developed as a shareware after all this years.