"Please insert next disc"

[julesjones]

I am re-installing Windows, and by extension Everything Else. I have been doing this for over a week now, and do not expect to finish before Monday. Knowing that it would take this long (if I was lucky) was one of the reasons I'd been putting it off, even though my installation has been getting steadily flakier for the last six months.

However, I am now at the stage where I have the OS, the million and one updates to the OS, my preferred browser, my grudgingly accepted but unloved primary viruschecker, and my prise-from-my-cold-dead-hands email/usenet client installed. Which means that I have contact with the outside world again, even if I'm still installing the other stuff, including my preferred office suite (which is not either MS or OpenOffice, thank you).

The one good thing about this process is that each piece of software comes on a single shiny disc. I remember all too clearly the days of sitting there with a stack of 15 floppies to install the then-current version of the preferred office suite...

(No, I do not want to move to Linux, not unless you want to write a Linux version of the email/usenet client and the office suite for me. Bear in mind that the office suite in question is in fact optimised for OS/2, and that I have been using it since the time of the OS/2 divorce. And that I occasionally fantasise about a port to VMS.)

Comments

[doire]

Turnpike v5? I like my text based email; let's see you get a nasty through that.

And I'm not moving on from Office 97 until Excel learns to replicate relative formulae across sheets. 1-2-3 could do it.

[julesjones]

I moved on to Turnpike 6 when they stopped releasing security updates for 5. They put in facilities for viewing HTML, but followed the Turnpike ethos of text is king -- the default is text and you have to explicitly select HTML display. And even then it offers an inline display that does fancy formatting and pictures but does *not* enable scripting, by design. Which is one reason why I'm still using Turnpike.

I keep finding new and interesting ways in which the MS office software still cannot do things I could do decades ago in other software.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Hrm. What is the office suite in question, out of curiosity?

[julesjones]

Lotus Smartsuite. The version I use dates from circa 1999, when IBM still hadn't entirely given up hope of convincing the world of the beauty of OS/2. I've just bought a cheap copy of the 2005 version, which ought to understand WinXP and thus save me from having to manually edit file permissions to allow a user account to do things. (I'm not stupid, I run Doze, but I only log into root for things that need root.)

[autopope.livejournal.com]

And I suppose it's too much to hope that IBM might have released a file import filter for the fork of OpenOffice now known as Lotus Symphony ...

[julesjones]

Having just checked the Wikipedia entry for Symphony, it says that it can handle SmartSuite file formats. However, it being an OpenOffice fork disinclined me to investigate further, unless someone who's used both comes along and tells me that Symphony uses the same mental model of a document as Word Pro does rather than the one used in MS Word.

I'm not exaggerating about this. I use Word at the day job because it's compulsory, but it drives me to screaming incoherent rage if I have to use it in any context other than pre-generated form letters, and sometimes even then. (I did a full on rant about this on rasfc some years back, and had Pat Wrede agree enthusiastically.) OpenOffice does exactly the same things that drive me nuts about Word, plus adds an undocumented incompatibility with Word that affects the one RTF/Word feature I *must* be able to access (and that my ancient Word Pro can handle perfectly well). Or at least it did the last time I seriously tried to use OO, which admittedly was when I was still in California, and thus some years ago.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I'd download a copy of Symphony anyway, if I were you.

It's free, and it gives you a route for turning SmartSuite documents into ODF, RTF, or .doc files if you ever feel you really need to move to a different platform.

(Meanwhile, there are alternatives. On OSX I'd recommend taking a look at (a) Pages, which is around £6 in the Mac app store and a very clean Apple UI-compliant word processor, and (b) Nisus Writer, which is not lightweight but may be the most powerful RTF-based word processor I've ever used. On Windows ... well, the 500 kilo gorilla that is MS Word has stunted the competition, but I'm sure there's other stuff out there.)

What's the RTF/Word feature you need?

[julesjones]

I may just do that, particularly as I can't find the install disk of my legal copy of MS Office (which I reluctantly bought back when I was job-hunting and everyone wanted "experience of Word and Outlook" as part of the job requirements). SmartSuite has a large range of import/export filters, but a current iteration of Lotus filters that can read modern M$ files would be useful. And better to poke at it occasionally now to see if I can get used to it than have to do so in a hurry come next machine. I do actually appreciate the suggestion, as I'd forgotten that there was a Lotus-flavoured OO fork.

I need to use electronic post-its. They are standard at my publisher for scribbling editing/copy-editing/proofing notes. (My editor sends rtf files rather than doc, and I think this is standard but couldn't swear to it.) When I seriously looked at using OO, it was on a version number that did not display them, and more importantly, did not say that they would not be displayed. Editor: "Why didn't you comment on the longer stuff in the stickies?" Me: "What stickies?" [opens file in Word pro] "Oh. Those stickies. WTF?"

The only acknowledgment that they were not displayed was buried somewhere deep in the bug tracker, where people kept asking when they were going to be implemented, and would get the very occasional reply that can be summarised as "you're the tenth person I've told today, there's no call for that feature" and/or "we're not wasting resources implementing a stupid toy that real users don't need". Both the undocumented lack of said feature and the attitude displayed to those who wanted at least a less obscure documentation of the non-functioning put me off OO. They were pushing OO at the time on the grounds of its intercompatibility with the Spawn of Redmond, and that was a *major* feature used in collaborative working. I had to wonder in what other ways it was rather a lot less compatible than claimed.

I generally work in Word Pro's native file format, but save regular backups as RTF and less regular backups as TXT. I'll also work in RTF file format if I'm doing manuscript rather than something that needs dtp tools. I like the tools in Word Pro, but I also like human-readable raw files that I can manually extract my 7 bit ASCII text from if the file glitches. It's *tedious* stripping the
control codes out of an RTF that's borked, but at least it's something I can copy-type from if necessary. And of course the final submission file is either RTF, or Word format for those editors who don't know any better.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Annotations (interoperable with MS Word's annotations) are a standard feature of OO.o now, and have been for a couple of years at least -- I think they came with 2.0, and we're now on version 3.2.

I work over copy-edited manuscripts with Ace these days using change tracking and annotations -- they use Word, I use one of the Mac forks of OO.o (there are three of 'em, confusingly enough). I notice you couldn't find the feature back in 2007 -- nearly five years ago.

[julesjones]

Yes, I couldn't find the feature 5 years ago, and it's been fixed since then -- but I'm not convinced that the accompanying attitude from the developers has been. But the primary problem is that I actively disliked the word processor precisely because of where it did emulate Word perfectly, and Open Office is very much not a feasible replacement for SmartSuite for me unless the mental model of a document has changed drastically since the last time I used it for more than viewing a document. And believe me, I *wanted* to like it. I won't voluntarily touch Word and its never-ending file format changes with a ten foot pole, but sometimes I have to handle Word files.

The 2005 version of SmartSuite is now installed, although I have yet to check that it does anything more than open correctly. I will fiddle about with that, then install Dragon, then a couple of other things, and then go and find the latest build of Symphony to play with.

[julesjones]

Found the posts from the time about the stickies. One's locked to my crit group, the other was a public summary, with further ranting about OO *and* Word in the comments threads.

http://julesjones.livejournal.com/132126.html
http://julesjones.livejournal.com/132390.html

[silly-swordsman.livejournal.com]

*throws mind back to the mid-90s when he first fell in love with OS/2*

WordPerfect 5?

[julesjones]

Lotus SmartSuite -- see reply to autopope above.

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

I'm curious about what the email/usenet client is. I'm in the market.

I put up with the thing that Microsoft supplied with Windows, but they don't supply it any more, and although I'll happily use web-based mailers, there's something about having all your mail locally. In case of disaster elsewhere. (As well as having it elsewhere, in case of disaster locally.)

[julesjones]

Turnpike, from Demon Internet. Many years ago, the ISP was looking for a solidly built email client to licence for their customers -- and liked it so much they eventually bought the company. Alas, it's no longer being developed, and has only the very occasional security update. (They gave up on trying to compete with Outlook Express...)

When I bought it, it was free for use with a Demon account but required a licence fee to use with other ISPs. I don't know what the situation is now, or if it's even possible to buy a licence for it. But the demon.ip.support.turnpike newsgroup can probably answer such questions.

You can find the exexutable, manual and installation instructions here:
http://knowledgebase.demon.net/article/how-to-install-and-use-the-turnpike-program.html

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

I was about to post that I bet that I was the only person on your flist who had a hope of guessing what your prise-from-my-cold-dead-hands email/usenet client is. Unfortunately I'm too late. :)

BTW, what version of Windows are you using?

[julesjones]

There are a couple of other Demonites who could have guessed. :)

I'm using XP Pro. It came with my ThinkPad, one of the benefits of coughing up for a business class machine back in the days when I knew people who could get me an IBM machine at employee discount rates. The re-install used the ThinkPad's built-in recovery facilities that will restore to factory condition from a hidden partition, which meant that I started from a base of 2006-vintage XP Pro Service pack 2, and then spent a day or two letting it fetch five years' worth of updates. XP Pro is actually not that bad, apart from its standard MS habit of accumulating cruft and bit rot over the years until it eventually breaks.

Sooner or later Turnpike will no longer be usable with whatever version of Doze is on a new computer, and I will be forced to export the spool and find something more modern. At that point I will probably re-consider Linux. Reluctantly. I used RSTS and then VMS before I ever met any of the Spawn of Redmond, so I don't automatically consider *nix the One True OS.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I'm still using Turnpike. At some point this desktop machine will have to be replaced, either because it breaks down or because I get to the point where new peripherals won't work with XP and I am forced to upgrade OS. I have no idea what email client I'll use then, though I gave up reading Usenet a couple of years ago, so I no longer need a Usenet client.

I have seriously considered moving to Linux at that point, partly to keep the cost down, but I do like PhotoShop Elements and I don't know what the equivalent for Linux would be. I have tried GIMP and found it very user unfriendly. Anyway, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

[julesjones]

I finally got around to installing 6.07, since I was installing anyway, and the readme for that explains how to install it in Vista, so they clearly did manage to get that working (they were still thrashing out some of the bugs for Vista upgrade when I stopped reading dist semi-regularly).

One of these days I may get the time and energy to work out how to setup the SSL workarounds needed to use it as an offline reader with things like GMail, but unfortunately everything I've ever seen on using something like stunnel is written by hackers for hackers, and assumes a lot of knowledge not possessed by the average luser.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

Sooner or later Turnpike will no longer be usable with whatever version of Doze is on a new computer, and I will be forced to export the spool and find something more modern.

Yes, that was why I was asking. Apparently Turnpike 6 will run under 32 bit Windows 7 but not 64 bit unless you install a Win XP VM.

I too have fond memories of VMS, though my first love was George 3 on the ICL 1900 range.

[julesjones]

I had a year on George 3 at some point in between the RSTS and the VMS. (Something I occasionally pointed out to people on usenet who declared that the only reason people used Windows was that they were sheep-like lusers who used what came pre-installed and didn't know that there were alternatives.)

I will further show my age by pointing out that I am *still* holding a grudge against Microsoft for the AARD code episode, which resulted in me having to get the DR-DOS patch and install it for the office 386, in the days when patches came on floppies through the post.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Yes, I so do not miss floppies...

[julesjones]

I still have some in the box of backup disks, I think including the aforementioned stack of fifteen. I may even have a functional drive for them somewhere...

[spacefall.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain.

Man, I miss SmartSuite.

[julesjones]

$EX_EMPLOYER finally gave in around 2000 and started migrating from SmartSuite to MS Office as the corporate software, to the disgust of everyone on my site. But I have refused to part with it at home, to the point of hand-editing permissions in order to install my 1999 vintage version when I finally bought an XP box.