Of course it gummed things up. It might as well have been a wooden shoe. The removal process appears to have left some scars, too, in the form of a series of browser crashes. These usually get better over time, as the usual level of cached nonsense rebuilds.
When color came to BBSing, I was not a fan. When GUIs came to text editors, I was extremely not a fan. (I'm still not, but it's the standard.) When the World Wide Web's pictures and Hypertext shoved the old Internet down the basement stairs and locked the door, I was not a fan.
Oh, it's pretty. And a well-designed GUI or webpage can be remarkably easy to use. But it runs on cruft: layers and layers of code that does not do the thing, but which does the stuff that reads or displays the stuff that talks to the stuff that calls up the stuff that shoves the other stuff into the hopper of the part that does the thing and spews out the result -- into the waiting arms of more stuff that calls up the stuff that loads the result into other stuff that massages it and filters it and hands it off to stuff that pushes buttons and turns knobs in order to show you the stuff that displays some stuff that reports the results of the thing -- and it does that over and over and over, very quickly, for everything from the most trivial to the most vital part of the display on the screen and wherever else the input comes from and the result goes. It's monkey motion, set up to keep you entertained rather than perform the task. In terms of writing,
The useless cruft on my PC just builds up and up. I have to rely on utilities from the operating system and software makers to try to clear it out (or, in one case, deleting a file folder known to cause problems as it grows) and in the meantime, the operationally-necessary cruft never goes away, and will eventually force me to replace this computer.
I suppose if I had a real Babbage, I'd be griping about backlash in the gear trains or a sticky carry adder.
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* I'm starting to C a pattern here. I blame Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
3 comments:
One feature WordPerfect had that AFAIK MS Word never implemented was "Reveal Codes". It cut out a lot of formatting frustration as I could see bits of orphaned formatting codes that were messing up the document.
MS may have implemented it, but I haven't used it for years since I quit working and at home use Libre Office (I ought to check for that feature there, but given the replicate Word, probably not)
Both have reveal codes M$ makes it hard to find. LibreOffice is easier to find.
I find most of the systems I encounter running M$ OS tend to be cranky and insecure.
Generally I still used Vedit and Teco, seriously old school but they do not cause me heartache and pain. I do not need to edit text with
embedded fancy fonts and pretty printing as that is always for me
the last step in the document process. I've been known to
use runoff (the original text markup) to produce pretty text.
All that runs on a 1979 version on a Z80 system... still!
I bailed on M$ 20+ years ago because of the cruft. The initial change
was aided by experience with other non-PC systems and their associated operating systems. Over all PCs were a giant step backward from systems I knew in the 80s.
Eck!
It's there. In both Word and LiberOffice, look for the pilcrow (paragraph symbol) in the toolbar. Click on it and it will show you all the embedded formatting commands.
Word is a little better at letting you edit them.
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