Charles - maybe *your* word processing has not changed much in the last decade... the rest of us have moved quite a ways. Under Windows 3.1 or 3.11 you had WYSIWYG but the print drivers were "external" and so the display was not necessarily what you would print - you had to use a klunky "print preview" to get an accurate representation, and if you didn't like the layout, you had to guess at what the changes would do. With trutype and print drivers as intelligent objects in Win95, that problem was solved - the display reflected what would print, and the display changed on the fly if you changed printer selections.
The overall linkage between media and multimedia sources and intended output had steadily improved, as has the ability to include complex compound objects. The Office suite has comprehended the use of "documents" as a lot more than hard copy - they are now a base format for information exchange, often real-time. For example, I can construct a word document which is designed to present an ad campaign, and therefore includes video clips, sound bites, live links to external web sites, and so on, and I can share that document in a netmeeting session and pass control around to various participants for comments, changes and approvals and watch the process as it happens. And at the end of the sessions, I have a record of the original document, every change that was made, who made it, who approved it, and when.
Of course, I still have a 6502-based VIC-20 single board computer, where I can pound out a mean newsletter in wordstar and print it on my original model laserjet, as long as I have the font cartridges installed and can remember all the escape codes to insert in the text <G>. So I guess if all I needed to do was do the things I was doing 20 years ago, I would have wasted all the money I spent on everything since 8-bit microprocessors... |
