From the Editor’s Desk: For Write or Wrong (Premium)

As a writer, I have a long and complex history with Microsoft Word, the greatest word processor the world has ever known. And with Word turning 40 last week, I reflected on my personal history with the app, which oddly predates my switch to Windows in the early 1990s by several years. And in comparing that history to my current experiences, I realized I have a few stories to share. It starts off good but goes downhill suddenly.

As you may know, I was an Amiga user in the early 1990s and I was not at all fond of Microsoft because of the shoddy nature of its software. This was a different era: MS-DOS and the PC had come to dominate the personal computer industry by that point, and Windows, despite its glaring issues, was just taking off. I couldn’t understand why. Here was this computer, the Amiga, that had sported a native GUI with real multitasking for several years, and yet most of the world was falling in lockstep behind one of the most technically inelegant platforms imaginable.

But even then, there were little flowers growing out of the dung heap that was the Microsoft of that era. As a budding software developer, I looked enviously at the simple elegance of Visual Basic (which is a description that could only be used by someone who had not actually experienced the language). But Microsoft’s productivity software, first released as individual apps over time and then organized into a bundle, or suite, had an even more profound impact on young Paul. Especially the word processor, Microsoft Word.

For all its strengths, the Amiga had multiple failings that Commodore either didn’t address or addressed too slowly. One of those, ironically, was tied to the system’s graphics display: Sure, the Amiga could display 4,096 colors and was particularly good at 2D and sideways scrolling games. But those capabilities were locked to specific low-resolution modes and were never improved in meaningful ways. And as the PC world moved into rock-steady high-resolution VGA and SVGA display resolutions, the Amiga did not. These resolutions were ideal for productivity software, like Word and the rest of Microsoft Office. And we had nothing like it on the Amiga.

We had WordPerfect, all too briefly. And a host of word processors and similar software that few would remember today. Excellence! (yes, with that exclamation point in the name). ProWrite. Final Writer. And others, I’m sure. It’s all lost in my brain to time. But what I remember all too well was that feeling of inferiority, of being stuck with less capable tools and longing for something better. Something that was already out there in the world. Just not for me.

By this time, I was already plotting my return to school so that I could study software development. And I knew that this would involve Windows and the PC, not the Amiga. In preparation for this inevitability, I started reading up on Windows software development, starting with Charles Petzold’s classic Programming Wi...