12 or 13 years ago I used a Mac Word Processor called Nisus Writer. It was fast and cheap and it easily fit on a 400K floppy. I think I sort of assumed that Nisus had fallen beneath the wheels of the Word Juggernaut (like WordPerfect) but it’s just popped up again, in gorgeous OS X (proper Cocoa) beta form with a very clean UI, good integration with OS X, super fast performance and some geeky things like PERL scripting (like I know what that is). The native file format is Rich Text Format but it reads and writes Word files (a bit buggy in the beta). I’m not an anti-MS zealot but I did take some pleasure switching from Powerpoint to Keynote a few months ago and I reckon I’m going to enjoy dumping Word too.
Tag: Word processing
“I don’t know why we call it a mouse…”
I just found Douglas Engelbart’s 34 year-old SRI demo in which he introduced the mouse, word processing, outlining, graphical displays, a nifty chord keyboard and dozens of other concepts that we now take for granted – all put together in a single RealVideo file a couple of years ago by Mike Lee.