It baffles me how usable Office 97 still. I was playing with it recently in a VM to see if it worked as well as I remembered, and it was amazing how packed with features it is considering it's nearing on thirty. There's no accounting for taste but I prefer the old Office UI to the ribbon, there's a boatload of formatting options for Word, there's 3D Word Art that hits me right in the nostalgia, Excel 97 is still very powerful and supports pretty much every feature I use regularly. It's obviously snappy on modern hardware, but I think it was snappy even in 1998.
I'm sure people can enumerate here on the newer features that have come in later editions, and I certainly do not want to diminish your experience if you find all the new stuff useful, but I was just remarkably impressed how much cool stuff was in packed into the software.
It's really astonishing how full-featured it all was, and it was running on those Pentium machines that had a "turbo" button to switch between 33 and 66 MHz and just a few MBs of RAM.
(edit to say I'm obviously ignoring i8n etc.)
With memory prices skyrocketing, I wonder if we will see a freeze in computer hardware requirements for software. Maybe it's time to optimize again.
Yeah you can get machines which are higher specced easily enough, but they’re usually at the upper end of the average consumers budget.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a23139/c...
The point being made was that for many people whose lives doesn't circle around computers, their computing needs have not changed since the early 1990's, other than doing stuff on Internet nowadays.
For those people, using digital typewriter hardly requires more features than Final Writer, and for what they do with numbers in tables and a couple of automatic updated cells, something like Superplan would also be enough.
Truly, I do not miss the swamp of toolbar icons without any labels. I don't weep for the old interface.
Just please don't gaslight us with some alternate Amiga bullshit history. All that shit was super slow, you were begging for +5Mhz or +25KB of cache. If Amiga had any success outside of teenage gamers, that stuff would have all been historical, just like it was on the Mac.
I am now starting to wonder how much of it has to do with network access to Sharepoint and telemetry data that most likely didn't exist in the Office 97 dial-up era.
Features-wise - I doubt there is a single feature I use (deliberately) today in Excel or Word that wasn't available in Office 97.
I'd happily suffer Clippy over Co-Pilot.
Meanwhile my home PC starts blowing whenever I fire up a video game.
It definitely was snappy. I used it on school computers that were Pentium (1?) with about as much RAM as my current L2 cache (16MB). Dirty rectangles and win32 primitives. Very responsive. It also came with VB6 where you could write your own interpreted code very easily to do all kinds of stuff.
If you were from Humanities and worked for a newspaper design layout you would use a Mac at work. That's it.
With the small caveat that I only use Word, it runs perfectly in WINE and has done for over a decade. I use it on 64-bit Ubuntu, and it runs very well: it's also possible to install the 3 service releases that MS put out, and the app runs very quickly even on hardware that is 15+ years old.
The service packs are a good idea. They improve stability, and make export to legacy formats work.
WINE works better than a VM: it takes less memory, there's no VM startup/shutdown time, and host integration is better: e.g. host filesystem access and bidirectional cut and paste.
It's an optional install. You can just click Custom, untick "Office Assistant" and other horrid bits of bloat like "Find Fast" and "Word Mail in Outlook" and get rid of that stuff.
That is absolutely not a valid generalisation.
I worked on Macs from the start of my career in 1988. They were the standard computer for state schools in education here in the Isle of Man in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The Isle of Man's national travel company ran on a Mac database, Omnis, and later moved to Windows to keep using Omnis.
It's still around:
I supported dozens of Mac-using clients in London through the 1990s and they were the standard platform in some businesses. Windows NT Server had good MacOS support from the very first version, 3.1, and Macs could access Windows NT Server shares over the built-in Appleshare client, and store Mac files complete with their Resource Forks on NTFS volumes. From 1993 onwards this made mixed Mac/PC networks much easier.
I did subcontracted Mac support for a couple of friends of mine's consultancy businesses because they were Windows guys and didn't "speak Mac".
Yes, they were very strong in print, graphics, design, photography, etc. but not only in those markets. Richer types used them as home computers. I also worked on Macs in the music and dance businesses and other places.
Macs were always there.
Maybe you didn't notice but they always were. Knowing PC/Mac integration was a key career skill for me, and the rise of OS X made the classic MacOS knowledge segue into more general Unix/Windows integration work.
Some power users defected to Windows NT between 1993 and 2001 but then it reversed and grew much faster: from around 2001, PowerMacs started to become a credible desktop workstation for power users because of OS X. From 2006, Macintel boxes became more viable in general business use because the Intel chips meant you could run Windows in a VM at full speed for one or two essential Windows apps. They ran IE natively and WINE started to make OS X feasible for some apps with no need for a Windows licence.
In other words, the rise of OS X coincided with the rise of Linux as a viable server and GUI workstation.
And they did video editing on Amigas with an add-on peripheral called a Video Toaster.
Video compression is a lot more computationally complex now than it was in the 90s, and it is unlikely that an Amiga with a 68k or old PowerPC would be able to handle 4k video with H265 or ProRes. Even if you had specialized hardware to decode it, I’m not 100% sure that an Amiga has enough memory to hold a single decompressed frame to edit against.
Don’t get me wrong, Video Toaster is super awesome, but I don’t think it’s up to modern tasks.
A fella can dream, anyways.
But perhaps I'm just projecting. Ugh, Electron.
So in other words, their computer needs have changed significantly.
You can't do most modern web-related stuff on a machine from the 90s. Assuming you could get a modern browser (with a modern TLS stack, which is mandatory today) compiled on a machine from the 90s, it would be unusably slow.
If they want to travel they go to an agency, they still go to the local bank branch to do their stuff, news only what comes up on radio and TV, music is what is on radio, CDs and vinyl, and yet manage to have a good life.
Wanted to get a Mac, needed to travel there, or order by catalogue, from magazine ads.
On my university there were about 5 LCs on a single room for students use, while the whole campus was full of PCs, and UNIX green/amber phosphor terminals to DG/UX rooms, on all major buildings.
Besides that single room, there were two more on the IT department, and that was about it.
When Apple was going down, between buying Be or NeXT as last survival decision, the fate of the university keeping those Macs around was being discussed.
So, A/V production, something I said too. My point still stands. Macs in Europe were seen as something fancy for media production people and that's it. Something niche for the arts/press/TV/cinema world.
Like I said, and you missed: but not only there.
People often mistake "Product A dominates in market B" -- meaning A outsells all others in B -- for "A only sells in market B."
Macs were expensive. Clone PCs were cheap. Yeah, cheap products outsell expensive ones. Doesn't mean that the expensive ones are some kind of fancy designer brand only used by the idle rich.
Step by step:
1. Install WINE, all defaults from OS package manager.
2. Open terminal. Change to directory with Office 97 install files.
3. Run `wine setup`
4. For me: turn off everything except the essential bits of Word. Do not install OS extensions, as they won't work. No bits that plug into other apps. No WordMail, no FastFind, no Quicklaunch toolbar, no Office Assistant.
5. Enter product key: 11111-1111111
6. Allow to complete.
7. Install SRs.
8. Run and use app.
No one got Macs at school either. First DOS, then Windows 95/98. Maybe in some Universities they used Macbooks well into the OSX era, as a reliable Unix machine to compile legacy scientific stuff; and even in those environments GNU/Linux began to work perfectly well recompiling everything from Sparcs and the like with a much cheaper price.
Forget about pre-OSX machines in Spain outside of a newspaper/publishing/AV producing office. Also, by the time XP and 2000 were realiable enough against OSX (w9x was hell) that OS was replaced for much cheaper PC alternatives.
I mean, if w2k/wxp could handle big loads without BSODing every few hours, that was a success. And as the Pentium 4's with SSE2 and Core Duo's happened, suddenly G4's and G'5 weren't that powerful any more.
You can do modern TLS stuff with a machine from the 90's if you cut own the damn JavaScript and run services from https://farside.link or gemini://gemi.dev proxying the web to Gemini.
My favorite was that Paste was a giant button while Cut and Copy were small because the UX research found that people paste more than they cut or copy...
Whereas I lived (and am back, sadly) in an offshore tax haven.
The rich used Macs. Musicians used Macs. They were not some dedicated tool only found in certain places. Entire industries, big important industries, ran on them.
What killed Commodore and Atari was that in the end although they had niches, they didn't conquer whole sectors.
This is why Sinclair Research tried to push into the business market with the QL. Sir Clive knew that the home/games sector was about thin margins and price battles, while in rich America, you could get fat on it, you can't in Europe.
He carved out an early niche as the cheapest home computers that were good enough and were competitive, but it was low-margin/high-unit-count.
The business market will pay for good tools. Bits of it paid extra for Macs for decades because they were good at some things.
That is a viable long-term market: "the best cheap home computer for the money" is not.
Still remember it was possible to perfectly mimick existing documents that had long stopped being printed with such a quality in replication.
The introduction of ribbons was a cruel mistake. It gets harder and harder to know where anything is located nowadays because ribbons hide options too often.