My first experience with word processing was a Word800 (not sure about the name though) for the Swedish computer Luxor ABC800 and I know there even was a word processor for the smaller ABC80 computer (this was in the early 1980's).
After that, at the university we had a PR1ME computer with a lot of PT200 terminals. The OS was Primos and the text editor was Emacs and the word processor was WordMarc. That machine also had another OS installed, called Primix, which was PR1ME's version of Unix, written in Fortran 77…! Later they threw the computer out (or maybe sold it, I don't know) and replaced it with a Unix machine with Emacs and WordMarc installed. The terminals were the very same PT200 from the old PR1ME time, but there was also a few graphical terminals for X Windows (or was is X Screen?). I also remember a couple of PC machines with Windows 3.1 and Word 6.0. I almost never used them though, and if I did, I logged in to the Unix machine from them and played MUD or something… When I bought my first computer in 1999, it was equipped with Windows 98 and Office '97, so I used it as it was. I remember it opening Excel in 1.5 seconds when it was new. A couple of months later it took approximately 6 seconds to do exactly the same thing… I also had a period of my life using pirate stuff, such as Office 2000, Windows 2000 and even Windows XP among a lot of other stuff, but I stopped doing that eventually. XP was way too slow on that PC anyway, which I realized very soon when it took about 30 seconds to open a simple folder. So I went back to non pirate software, which meant that I cleaned the whole machine and installed Windows 98 back to it for a while. I also tried StarOffice 5.2 (or was it 5.1?), but it crashed almost immediately so I left it behind me. A few years later I tried OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 and since then I have never installed anything else. Of course I have used later versions of MS Office, at work for example, but I never had it at home. Soon I realized that there was a few things that didn't work well with OpenOffice.org, especially language specific things, such as sorting Swedish characters, so I filed a few issue reports and most of them lead to corrections, which made me very happy (OpenOffice.org now sort the Nordic characters åäöÅÄÖæøÆØ properly – thanks to me… :P …and perhaps a developer or two…). A little more than a year back I switched to Linux so now I use OpenOffice.org all the time. I have tried AbiWord and gNumeric a few times, but I never liked any of them enough to keep using them, even if I can see their advantages. Since I switched to Linux I started to use Emacs again which feels very nice! I am now trying to learn programming C++ again. I noticed that very much happened to that language since I was using it, so most things that I could do back then wouldn't work with today's compilers, so there's a lot to relearn and a lot of new stuff to learn as well. I wonder if WordMarc still exists, by the way… I think that I'm actually going to find out…! ☺
