Microsoft Word: A Lament

After a recent update to Microsoft Word, a window popped up to tell me about the Copilot “AI” feature. Of course, Copilot is not an artificial intelligence . . . it’s a large-language model text generator. These novelty chat-bots have their place, but they are not intelligent. They are clever fakes.

Regardless, Microsoft added a big Copilot button to my “ribbon” menu, a Copilot chat sidebar, and empty documents have some helpful placeholder text now: “Select the icon or press Alt + i to draft with Copilot.” These “features” are easy enough to disable, thank God. I want my word processor to leave me alone and let me write.

I have a tendency to be an old curmudgeon; I’m told that I was born eighty-five years old. Amid my griping about having another feature to turn off every time I install Word on a new machine, it occurred to me that maybe I am being too judgmental. When Microsoft introduced the “ribbon” menu system, I criticized that too. It doesn’t bother me anymore.

But does that mean the “ribbon” was an improvement, or did I just get used to it?

To find out, I decided to write this in Microsoft Word 2000. It’s old, it’s ugly, and it smells bad [figuratively] . . . but it’s a joy to use. It just works. There’s no clutter, no B.S., and no gimmicks ( . . . except Clippy). The useful features are easy to find and easy to use. It has normal menus, normal toolbars, and normal dialogs that do their jobs well.

Things change. Sometimes they get better; sometimes they get worse. Word’s user interface took a big step backwards with the ‘ribbon’ and it still hasn’t recovered. Perhaps Microsoft should work on fixing that instead of bolting Copilot Clippy the eager chat-bot into their flagship word processor.

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I wrote this in Microsoft Word 2000 on an emulated period-correct PC running Microsoft Windows 2000. For some reason, I was then inspired to see how many word processors and operating systems I could convert and load the document on (without retyping it) . . . so, uh, here are the results.

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Old, New, and Alternative

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As Written – Microsoft Word 2000

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Modernity – Microsoft Word 365

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An Alternative – LibreOffice 25.2

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Some Oldies

I have a particular affinity for WordPerfect 6.1, which was my main word processor for many years. The version I had was from the brief time when Novell owned it and included it as part of an office suite called Novell PerfectOffice. Though Microsoft Word was perfectly usable, something about this version of WordPerfect always felt exactly right for me.

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Old Linux and Older DOS

I did a lot of word processing in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, but it’s not very user friendly. In retrospect, after comparing it with Microsoft Word for DOS and WordStar 7 for DOS, I think Microsoft probably had the better product.

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Over to MacWorld

I have been a Mac user on-and-off over the years too.

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Back in MacTime

Ah, the “classic” Macintosh operating system. Some of my earliest computing memories were on an original floppy-based Macintosh, and I did some of my first typing in MacWrite.

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The Forgotten Contenders

There were other operating systems in the 1990s, believe it or not, and they also had word processors.

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Just Keep Emulating

The early 8- and 16-bit personal computers had word processors too.

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Handheld Computers

Don’t forget about those forgotten handheld wonders we called “PDAs.”

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Device, Emulator, and Software Information

Here are some details about the software I used to get all those screenshots.

Physical Device (all screenshots)

• Odyssey custom desktop PC (Intersanity Wormhole)
  • Microsoft Windows 11 (24H2)
    • Microsoft Word 2504 (Microsoft 365 subscription)
    • LibreOffice 25.2

Emulators & Virtualizers

• 86box
  • Intel Pentium MMX PC with BeOS 5
    • Gobe Productive 2.0
  • Intel Pentium MMX PC with IBM OS/2 Warp 4
    • DeScribe 5.0
  • Intel Pentium MMX PC with NeXTStep 4.1
    • Lighthouse OpenWrite 2.1
  • Intel Pentium II PC with Debian 2
    • AbiWord 0.7
  • Intel Pentium II PC with Windows 2000
    • Microsoft Word 2000
• Altirra
  • Atari 800XL with Atari DOS 2
    • AtariWriter Plus
• AppleWin
  • Apple IIe with Apple ProDOS
    • AppleWorks 1.0
• Basilisk II
  • Generic 68k Macintosh with Apple Macintosh System 7.5
    • ClarisWorks 4.0
    • Microsoft Word 6.0
• DOSBox-X
  • Generic DOS PC with emulated DOS environment
    • MicroPro WordStar 7.0
    • Microsoft Word 5.5
    • WordPerfect 5.1
  • Generic DOS PC with Microsoft Windows 3.1
    • Microsoft Word 6.0
    • Microsoft Works 2.0
    • Novell WordPerfect 6.1
  • Generic DOS PC with Microsoft Windows 98SE
    • Sun StarOffice 5.2
• Einstein
  • Apple Newton MessagePad 2100 with Apple NewtonOS 2.1
    • Apple NewtonWorks
• GSPlus
  • Apple IIGS with Apple GS/OS
    • AppleWorks GS 1.1
• Microsoft Device Emulator
  • Generic PDA with Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003
    • Microsoft Pocket Word 2003
• Mini vMac
  • Apple Macintosh Plus with Apple Macintosh System 6
    • Apple MacWrite 2.2
    • Microsoft Word 3.02
• Palm OS Emulator (POSE)
  • Handspring Visor Pro with PalmOS 3.5
    • Dataviz Word To Go 5
• Psion EPOC Java Emulator
  • Psion Series 5 with EPOC32
    • Built-in word processor
• QEMU
  • Apple Power Mac G4 with Apple Mac OS 9.2
    • AppleWorks 6.2
    • Microsoft Word:Mac 2001
  • Apple Power Mac G4 with Apple Mac OS X 10.2
    • Microsoft Word:Mac 2004 (11.2)
• SDLTRS
  • Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III with TRSDOS
    • Tandy Scripsit 1.3
• VICE
  • Commodore 128 with Berkeley GEOS
    • Berkeley geoWrite 2.1
• VMWare Workstation Pro with Unlocker
  • Virtualization layer with Apple MacOS 15.4
    • Microsoft Word 16 (Microsoft 365 subscription)
    • Apple Pages 14
• WinUAE
  • Commodore Amiga 1200 with AmigaOS 3.1
    • Digita WordWorth 4SE