1973 >5.88 MHz >96 to 512 kB of RAM >606x808 portrait CRT >mouse >Programmable down to the microcode >Based Bravo text editor with multi-file and multi-window support, quick keyboard shortcuts, copy and paste, selection, formatting, replay mode.
Today: M$ Office requirements >1 GHZ or faster x86 or x64 processor with SSE2 >2 to 4 GB RAM >3 GB of free disk space >1024 x 768 display >Must purchase a license. >M$ Word still sucks
>Why is this level of inefficient bloat allowed? You could still perfectly use Office 2003 that has several times lesser requirements than modern Office. These days I just think their laziness is what makes it this bloat. There's no other reason.
Also the Alto was an experimental machine, not a consumer one.
Chase Turner
My dad has worked at Xerox since the 80's and still talks about how stupid the higher-ups were, essentially giving away their technologies to M$ and Apple bc of how short-sighted they were.
Carson Miller
You sure it wasn't true that they just weren't interested in commercialising it? The whole point of basically giving it away was to actually benefit everyone and not just be a greedy jew. Douglas Engelbart himself has freely given away his ideas.
Ian Peterson
He knew people on the board of directors. They literally saw no use for the technologies, they thought their engineers were "making useless thingamabobs that no business could ever utilize"
Charles Brooks
>LaTeX is the best now and forever. Unless you're like me and have a boss that demands everything be a Word document. I tried using every converter I could find and none of them convert my PDF to a Word file and keep the formatting right. It's not even complicated things, no complex tables or anything like that, it's just text with a few figures and a table of contents, but Word fucks it up.
Tyler Watson
While I agree with you, LaTeX is not a text editor.
Connor Roberts
Your boss is a cunt. Change jobs.
Blake Sanders
Yet they founded them generously and without questions. Xerox did a great thing for all of us. Even when they didn't get much back.
Dominic Parker
it's too late. I started writing a LaTeX-DOCX compiler.
The format is fucking retarded so it's taking more time than I thought.
Jaxson Long
Is that why the shareholders were freaking out when MS came out of nowhere with the technologies they deemed useless and started making bank? lol t. was alive in the 80's
Owen Mitchell
>I started writing a LaTeX-DOCX compiler. I'll help with the logo.
Josiah Davis
I'm not saying they didn't, I'm saying that the way they founded the engineers and let them develop open mindedly on their own ideas was great. It took decades to get back to the same point in the industry.
Ryder Martinez
Call it docTeX
Jack Collins
why not just use pandoc?
Luis Rogers
Yes go-i mean user, Xerox were very beneficial to you, the consumer!
Isaac Phillips
MS Works 4.5a. Word Processor/Spreadsheet/DB/Communication/Templates + Optional Calendar all for $40.00. Also had IE 4.01 on CD. Very nice package. All unified program that fully installed used like maybe 100mb. Still got the original CD/plastic case. Came with an actual getting started book. Not to be confused with the later Works Suite editions which sucked big time.
Luis Bailey
Fuck off retard, you don't even know what we're talking about.
Adam Morales
Ah, I get what you mean. It is curious that around the time MS and Apple took off is also when engineers for large companies were put on tight leashes.
Parker Hall
Indeed, especially when their "own ideas" where based on just the opposite.
Isaiah Howard
You must be new here. I was just tricking you to measure your intelligence. I'm now sure I'm more intelligent than you.
Portability, feature bloat, programmer laziness, and retarded designers saying "ITS TWENTY*CLAP*SEVEN*CLAP*TEEN WHY WOULDN'T THE USER INTERFACE BE FUCKING HUUUUGE? ITS MORE ACCESSIBLE! WHY DO YOU HATE THE DISABLED!?!?!??!"
Nolan Cooper
Already mentioned here
David Perez
>Why is this level of inefficient bloat allowed? because "lol everyones got atleast 4 cores @ 3ghz and 16gb of ram so we dont have to optimize our code anymore"
Ian White
This. These days user time means less than developer time.
Carter Fisher
Why is Smalltalk such a shitty language?
Gavin Garcia
Because you suck at it
Gavin Hernandez
1973 >minimum requirements are far beyond that of any commercially available microcomputer and beyond even many minicomputers >runs on incredibly power-hungry systems the size of a chest freezer that cost $20,000-$30,000 before inflation that you couldn't acquire unless you were a big-name computer science department or someone with special connections/agreements with Xerox >"it's SO efficient!" 2017 >minimum requirements are basically the absolute entry-level that any system built within the last 10 years could supply >runs on toasters you can buy from a thrift store for $20 >"it's SO bloated!" >using the jew meme while shitting all over Xerox for not patent trolling and enforcing cancerous vendor lock-in on their customers
Jonathan Hughes
>missing the point this much
Camden Evans
Not the point. Stop being an obvious troll.
What OP meant is that more can be done with less. Look at the Office 2003 vs current Office example.
Andrew Cox
There's also the LISP machine document linking engines that makes HTML look like babby mode.
Elijah Thomas
>Not the point. >What OP meant is that more can be done with less. So yeah, basically a bloat circlejerk. What did it do more of again? Keyboard shortcuts? Multi-file support? Xerox marketed a lot of office technologies derived from that work over the years but they all flopped hard. I wonder why.
What do you use for these kinds of tasks anyway? I constantly see you cry about software like Office and Photoshop in these threads like you're using them despite numerous, far less "bloated" options being available, or older software you can easily emulate. It makes me think.
David Gomez
I have no idea who you think I am. I'm the user who uses Office 2003 daily. Yes, there's no point in this thread, it's just crying about bloat. Still preferred the read here then some marketing thread.
Aaron Baker
They were essentially pioneers by accident.
Lot's of great innovations set aside because their business people were stuck in an old mindset and didn't see the shifting trends.
Andrew Powell
This word 2003 is perfection. No crash, can read docx, snappy etc. excel is better on 2007+ tho
Justin Scott
I don't think you're anyone in particular, I'm just asking you what you use to confirm to the virtues you continuously espouse. Why 2003 that requires a minimum 400 fucking MB of disk space and 128 MiB of RAM? The Alto did "more" work better with just a 2.5 MB removable disk pack and fit it in a paltry maximum of 512 KiB, after all. Personally, I use Ted a lot on older systems, the whole package is barely 3 MB. >Still preferred the read here then some marketing thread. What do you think this thread is? Everyone in here is basically just jerking off to a two-hour long sales presentation of a dead system, deifying it and talking it up to an unrealistic and incredibly nostalgia-goggled standard while trying to use it to push an agenda. Nobody in here has ever used an Alto or even one of its derivatives like the PERQ or Star, you're just sucking marketer-cock from the past. It may still be more interesting than some retarded gamer faggot from plebbit blogging about what boring mid-range card he's going to put in his boring mid-range PC but in the end these threads are still just as full of hysterical cringy dipshits who barely know shit about the technology beyond the names and big-picture overview of the magic boxes putting pixels on the screen. There's nothing wrong with wanting to advocate better practice in software development when it comes to efficiency, there's certainly room for it in many cases, but these kinds of threads aren't where you're going to find level-headed discussion about it. Just retards who can't understand why shiny pretty video games sometimes use less resources than language interpreters or why certain things that seem like they shouldn't be computationally expensive have a ton of overhead.
Nolan Jenkins
>What did it do more of again? Are you really this autistic that you don't know what a figure of speech means?
Okay. That explains it. I rest my case and leave without starting any bigger autistic shitpost fests.
Easton Young
>Nobody in here has ever used an Alto Wrong.
Also pic related
Matthew Jackson
Because Pandoc doesn't produce the formatting correctly, and turns all of the text blue for some reason.
Robert Morgan
Ah, you get pressed for more and now it's just a figure of speech and we should all forget about it. I rest my case as well. I also aimlessly fondled an Alto for 20 minutes at the LCM once. I've emulated similar systems, too. I wouldn't consider it "use." >I am entitled to have a safe space where every opinion echoes mine and nobody disagrees with me or calls me out on my stupidity! I'm sorry, I didn't realize this thread was moved to r/technology. I'll leave immediately now!
Fucking lol, I love luddites.
Jacob Brown
>xerox alto >"text editor"
Colton Garcia
>thread at page 10 >no new IP, but suddenly a bump post with dumb content >"oh no, can't let my bait posts 404" nice dedication pretty pathetic though
Luis Rivera
>The Alto did "more" work better with just a 2.5 MB You haven't fully used Word, right?
Brayden Wood
>What are Macros >What are Equation editors >What are inline images, graphs, and tables
Carson Morris
if pandoc works other than that, i'd simply postprocess it using some .net or java docx library and correct that mistake instead of writing the whole fucking thing from scratch. That depends on your goal though, if you write it from scratch because pandoc fucks up much more than that or because you enjoy doing so, good luck on your path!
