
These packages worked fine...
Basically, for 90% of I needed to then and since these packages worked fine.
Indeed, very true. And that is something that never stops to amaze me: listening to "others" nowadays, it all seems to hinge on "The Only One"™ and no alternatives "exist". Or should even be considered!
Reading through Nina's piece I had vague (Age? Booze?) memories of GEOS on the C64. Which did the job too, making me happy since I could not afford a PC yet. It all worked fine, despite the PITA of printing the final version of your project report on a 8 pins Oki printer... the night before you had to hand it in... ALL through the night..... Niiiiii, clank, niiiiiiiiiii, clack, niiiiiiiiiii, clank. Luckily my bed was located above the cupboard with the Oki... in a very careful configuration so the paper didn't tangle/ jam...
But yes, I agree. Later managed to get an IBM 30 out of a bust office auction. And WordPerfect 4.2 on it was... well, perfect. The WYSIWYG graphics of 5.0 were just "unnecessary indulgence". Quattro Pro did everything I do today too. CorelDraw let me make those images that looked very nifty in Harvard Graphics. And yes, ReferenceManager gave you that feeling automation really, REALLY saved you SO MUCH time and work. (Who of you have done, like me, their in text literature refs by hand,,, and then had to reorder all subsequent references and their list at the end 10.000 times, because you added reference #24? ;)))
Microsoft got lucky
@Liam: THX for the piece Liam! Let me add a thought here: I also think it was (just) very clever marketing. What I do remember from those days too that Microsoft "allowed" people to copy and use Windows everywhere. Everybody had a copy of Windows on their home computer. The running argument was that if people used it at home, they would nag their boss to also get it at work (where the MS money is made). It was all over the place, everybody gave it to everybody. And it was all good. And possible, since all could use it on their PCs. Contrary to the (way more expensive) Apple (software). And thus MicroSoft applied the "dealer-dependancy" model which works up to this day: give it away for free, get them hooked on it, and then charge them for it.
But yeah... "No fancy windows, no unnecessary bloat, just basic, it works, software". Happy days...