I was blown away by Geoworks. Using a 25MHz 286 felt like a power machine. I remember printing a page with a Giant lower case e on it to see if it scaled it up to full page nicely. It printed two pages. The second just had a tiny triangle of black on it. Looking at my document I saw the end of the e had just clipped past the edge of the page.
At the time WYSIWYG was a bullet point promise that never delivered. Seeing it actually happen was amazing. That it was in a product that had the feel of "Of course it does it that way, because that's how it should be done"
I often lament that it was never an Open Source project. It got passed around companies looking to use it in some niche or other while it slowly decayed. It had enough enthusiasts that as an open project it would have developed.
Acorn delivered proper WYSIWYG that actually worked on RiscOS around the same time. Everyone else was still playing with WordPerfect. TechWriter depicted below and impression were ridiculously powerful:
So while your peers were just about getting a 386 with DOS/windows 3, you had a 32-bit ARM workstation with full anti aliased font rendering and production grade print capability.
Shame the kernel was poo and the file system so disparate to everything else or it may have taken off.
Comments
I was blown away by Geoworks. Using a 25MHz 286 felt like a power machine. I remember printing a page with a Giant lower case e on it to see if it scaled it up to full page nicely. It printed two pages. The second just had a tiny triangle of black on it. Looking at my document I saw the end of the e had just clipped past the edge of the page.
At the time WYSIWYG was a bullet point promise that never delivered. Seeing it actually happen was amazing. That it was in a product that had the feel of "Of course it does it that way, because that's how it should be done"
I often lament that it was never an Open Source project. It got passed around companies looking to use it in some niche or other while it slowly decayed. It had enough enthusiasts that as an open project it would have developed.
Acorn delivered proper WYSIWYG that actually worked on RiscOS around the same time. Everyone else was still playing with WordPerfect. TechWriter depicted below and impression were ridiculously powerful:
http://www.mw-software.com/icon-tech/Products/TechWriter/Tec...
So while your peers were just about getting a 386 with DOS/windows 3, you had a 32-bit ARM workstation with full anti aliased font rendering and production grade print capability.
Shame the kernel was poo and the file system so disparate to everything else or it may have taken off.
Amiga users could enjoy the likes of PageStream and Papyrus Office, also about the same time.