OK.  Everyone take a seat and have someone standing by with smelling salts, because this might come as a shock, and I would hate for any readers to topple over and gash their heads on the corners of nearby tables.  Are you ready?  Here goes....

I don't write with Microsoft Word.

Let's pause for you to recover from the shock.  No, you heard me right: I don't use Microsoft Word.  In fact, I despise Microsoft Word, but I do have a modicum of respect about how Microsoft has carried bugs over all the way from at least version 3 and managed to tout them as features.

First, a little history.  Not knowing any better in the late 1980s, I had Word on my laptop.  This was, of course, in the early days of Windows, so everything was a bit more crude than it is today.  Still, I was frustrated with Word because it would get a paragraph in some weird format mode and the only way to fix it was to delete it and type it in again.  I had this crazy idea that the people at Microsoft should try actually using their products.  Then came the day when I got my hands an a trial copy of Ami Pro.

A moment for some history.  the Ami word processor was originally developed by Samna, and to this day, if you look through my file archives you will still see files with the .sam extension.  Ami was the first practical word processor developed for Windows, and was a real what-you-see-is-what-you-get product.  Yes, they even beat Microsoft to the draw.  Samna was purchased by Lotus development, and turned into Ami Pro, which included some enhancements, and was what I had the demo version of.

In short, after trying it, I gave Microsoft Word perhaps as long as a day before I uninstalled it.  Ami Pro kicked its ass up one side and down the other.  It was robust, intuitive in its functionality, and a sheer pleasure to use by comparison.  Then, shortly thereafter, Lotus upgraded it again, called it Word Pro, and I was in seventh heaven.  Unlike Word, if I didn't know how to do something, I would think, "If I had written this word processor (and I had written one by that time) how would I have implemented this?"  Nine out of ten times I would try that, and it would work.  I had a marvelous product that apparently had been developed by people who could both program and write.  I think it must have been a first for the software industry.

In the mid 2000s, when I was working on my bachelor's degree, I made an honest attempt to use Word for lab reports, because it was what almost everyone used.  I gave up on the attempt.   It proved to be fruitless, and I went back to Word Pro.

So just what is so great about Word Pro, you might wonder.  You mean besides being able to put tables in tables, which Word couldn't do?  Besides being so intuitive to use?  You know those pesky dialogs in Word, where you have to drill down, down, down and click a bunch of OKs to see what a format change looks like?  Well check out the box to the left.  Pop this baby up, and whatever text you select automatically has its attributes displayed here, and anything you change here is instantly reflected in the text.  Anything you've changed that differs from the style settings shows up with a red dot beside it so you know.  Granted, Word is starting to work this way -- after 20 years!  There are similar dialogs for page setup, image format, you name it.  Furthermore, all the dialogs for spell check, format check, find and replace, aren't dialogs at all, but panels that dock below the toolbar so they don't cover up what you're trying to see.  Someone really thought this out.  The equation editor beat the socks off Word's.  Then, there is the main reason I switched back.  I had to use a lot of tables and graphs built by other applications, and, frankly, my ten-year-old version of Word  Pro imported OLE objects from other software better than the current version of MS Word, and OLE is a Microsoft technology!

One might wonder why Word Pro didn't take the world by storm.  Well, it should have.  But, you see, IBM bought out Lotus.  I had mixed feelings about that, largely because of what happened to OS/2.  You might have heard of it.  OS/2 was IBM's windowed operating system that competed at the time with Microsoft Windows.  It shouldn't have been a competition at all, because OS/2 kicked Windows' butt as thoroughly as Word Pro kicked MS Word's.  You could even run Windows in an OS/2 window and it worked perfectly, or rather, as well as it would work on its own.  Just try that the other way around.  Ha!  Fat chance!  Furthermore, if you wrote code that talked directly to hardware ... well, you should know that's a definite no-no for any multitasking operating system, but in the old DOS days, it was fine to do so, and sometimes necessary.  The word processor I wrote attained its speed by writing directly to video RAM. Not to worry; OS/2 intercepted direct hardware I/O and processed it accordingly.  My word processor also worked fine.  On top of that, OS/2 was compliant with the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), which was vastly superior in multiple ways to Microsoft's System Object Model (SOM).

So what happened?  Why do we live in a Windows world if OS/2 was so superior?  That's a good question, and brings us back to why I had mixed feelings about IBM's buying Lotus.  IBM had a track record of beating Microsoft on the technological front, just as Borland delighted in doing something shortly after Microsoft declared it impossible.  But as good as IBM was technologically, they were comparably bad at marketing.  No one seemed to know they had a better operating system, and few people figured out that through Lotus, they had a better word processor.  On the other hand, Microsoft was deviously (and possibly illegally) persistent and forceful at marketing, and killed all of its competitors.

As I had feared, Word Pro ended up dying, just as other superior technologies died under marketing power: Beta video cassettes instead of VHS, HD-DVD instead of Blu-Ray.

Yet the story is not over, and IBM continued to blunder.  They released a free office suite called Symphony.  Much of the code was based on the Open Office suite, which deeply baffled me.  If they wanted to release a free competitor to stick a knife under the ribs of Microsoft, they had a much better starting point: Lotus Smartsuite, which included Word Pro, and 1-2-3, which was the original Windows spreadsheet program.  They could have polished Smartsuite up a bit, released it, and kicked Microsoft's butt once again.  But of course, they did the wrong thing, and released something that couldn't compete.

Attention: IBM : if you ever want to release the SmartSuite code into public domain, I'd be delighted to take it over.

Hence, my tribute (or should I call it a requiem) for the best word processor ever written.  As far as I am concerned it still is.  I am forced, from time to time by circumstance, to use Microsoft Word, and it seems that they are finally, after 30 years, starting to iron some of the kinks out of it.  Microsoft has always been slow getting things right.  Over the years, they have glitzed up Word's interface and added features, but that stupid paragraph formatting glitch that pissed me off in the beginning, was still there the last I looked.

So, I still stick with the best.  My installation CD is stored in my fire safe, and backed up in other locations.  I don't know what I would do without it.  It is possible to convert Word Pro documents to Word format, but even so, Word seems to know that it came from something else and totally screws up the import.  It still is not very robust.  Besides, I would feel as if I were prostituting myself by switching.

So tonight, if you have any honor, go out and have a pint, toasting to a real word warrior.