Back in '85-6 I developed training for USDA (using Dan Bricklin's Demo) for a curses version of Word 5 that ran on 3B2s with SysV v2. I'd be very happy to see that ported to Linux or one of the BSDs.
In fact, I'd love to see both Word and Excel '98 on one of my workstations. IMHO things went South after that.
I had to use Windows and Office off and on with clients up to 2010 and I'm sure that Excel provided some important edge-case functionality after '98, but for me the UI went steadily to sh*t.
FWIW, Office 97 works perfectly under Wine, so there's nothing stopping you from continuing to use it, well, except maybe the lack of support for modern OOXML formats. An alternative could be Abiword and Gnumeric, both are super lightweight and retain the classic Office 97-style UI and support OOXML formats (though somewhat limited compared to LibreOffice).
Does the activation still work for these are do you have to use a hack to get them running? I still have a TON of older Office 2003 licenses, I'd love to go back. I've hated modern Office with the ribbon for half my life now.
The product keys still work. You can skip online activation. Only annoyance is needing to run once as admin to make the EULA acceptance write to the registry.
I have a stockpile of patches that I preserved a while back that are not readily available today.
Please don't. There are so many unpatched exploits for old Office... opening any document could trash your whole system or silently steal information from you.
https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/wordperfect.html describes getting the UNIX release of Word Perfect running on modern Linux. There was a SCO release of Word in 1990, so plausibly that could be fudged into a similar setup?
Perhaps the title would be more accurate if it were "The way my friends and I prefer to think of it, the age of the universe is nearly twice as old as we used to like to think of it."
Perhaps one could say, "It was clear who was right and who was wrong--whichever side you were on, that side was right and the other side was wrong" whichever struggle is being considered. Whichever faction you identified with was right, just like now.
Even just looking at the Cold War period, this still doesn’t quite cover the complexities. There was an entire anti-war movement full of folks who thought the US should pull out of Vietnam without necessarily supporting the other side of that conflict/war.
Chicago (Cook County) went 83% for Clinton in 2016, 74% for Obama in 2012, 76% for Obama in 2008, 79% for Kerry in 2004 and 68% for Gore in 2000. Biden's 2020 numbers were on the low side of average for a Democrat candidate there, probably didn't involve an unusual number of independents or disaffected Republicans...
St. Louis City went 82.71% for Obama for context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_presidentia... so higher than cook... but the city of stl is generally even more blue and was one of the highest rates for obama nation wide. STL took it as a point of pride to vote more for obama than chicago where obmama is from.
Agree wholeheartedly with your (a) and (b), and would add:
(c) Emacs won't disappear after a few years (where "few" can mean decades if your career lasts that long - mine ran from 1967 to 2011 and I still use emacs daily) the way virtually every (or maybe every) "more intuitive" editor/environment will, given time. Your investment in learning it will really pay off.
Emacs won't disappear... the way every "more intuitive" editor will
Adoption rates of intuitive IDEA and Visual Studio, while not quite as
old, have long pushed Emacs into niche territory. Emacs hasn't
disappeared only in the sense any venerable UNIX utility hasn't.
Is this supposed to be some kind of ding? Because it is (if I may be so bold) not a very good one. Like, look at dd! We're still stuck with that stupid shit after nearly 50 years. It doesn't even have POSIX-style command line arguments! 50 years.
"hasn't disappeared only in the sense any venerable UNIX utility hasn't"? "Only" doing a lot of work here! That's the most reassuring "only" I've read all day. I bet you a pound people will still be using Emacs in 2050.
When I started doing Java, everyone else was using JBuilder. Then Eclipse came along, and JBuilder died. Next, IDEA showed up, and Eclipse started to whither. Don't get me wrong, IDEA is great but IDEs do come and go, and are subject to the fortunes of the company that pushes development.
Though all of that, I have used GNU Emacs, definitely an unconventional choice for Java development. I've occasionally tried the leading IDE, and while it's sometimes been helpful to ramp up on new projects with tools shared with other teammates, the productivity of a comfortable and customized Emacs environment has always drawn me back.
In 10 years, IDEA and VS may or may not be still widespread, but Emacs will definitely still have its niche.
Perhaps, but Atom has already disappeared, and VS Code might, too.
Not to say that you should use Emacs instead of VS Code or anything else. Just that Emacs not disappearing means that your investment to learn it and set it up is more likely to keep yielding returns.
If existence is tantamount to corporate sponsorship, then GNU Emacs
never existed. It'd take one or two graybeards with too much free time
to sustain Atom. Just look at the current Emacs maintainers.
While I've been a "geek" since I joined IBM in 1967, I've been primarily a writer for at least 35 years. In that time, I've used Wordstar, WordPerfect, literally every flavour of MS Word up to 2011, vi, iTerm and emacs.
I've converted files of one format to another to another to another, and finally to ASCII text and that is that. No more orphaning as one or another company goes out of business or decides to update their file format.
My editor now is Emacs and, depending on who/what I'm writing for I use plain text, or org or md if I need to include basic formatting. I've published enough to know that I'm a wordsmith, not an artist and going beyond basic formatting is a job for a typographic artist, which I'm not.
I know that makes me a grumpy old fart, as does my refusal to rely on The Cloud (i.e., Somebody Else's Computer) for backups, and so be it. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice (or more), shame on me.
There seem to be a lot of Apple users who wouldn't agree. My MacBook Pro is early 2011 so I haven't been able to use the newest, but I can't say that each upgrade from Lion to High Sierra was clearly an improvement for my use cases (writing and coding). YMMV.
In fact, I'd love to see both Word and Excel '98 on one of my workstations. IMHO things went South after that.
I had to use Windows and Office off and on with clients up to 2010 and I'm sure that Excel provided some important edge-case functionality after '98, but for me the UI went steadily to sh*t.