Re: Customer support, not Computer Support
There were two Microsoft Word apps of "that era": 5.x and 6.x. 5.x Mac was a really nicely written piece of software; in the same vein as Mac Excel, which I preferred to any other spreadsheet on Mac.
6.x, on the other hand was awful. Whereas 5 had been written to the native Mac Toolbox, 6 abandoned this and instead ran on top of a horribly-implemented library of Windows-like UI functions. It needed more memory, more disk-space, and it ran slower and had a UI that was completely unlike its predecessor: In the end, customers complained so much that MS "de-discontinued" the old Word 5.2 for Mac.
Okay, what they were trying to do was a good thing (the core logic of Word was the same sourcecode, and so completely compatible), but the execution left a lot to be desired. But it was the late 1990s, and this kind of "cross-platform UI toolkit" thinking was everywhere.
Personally, all my engineering docs were in ClarisWorks Writer. It did numbered sections, and it did a TOC and index. What more do you need? (These were the days when "reviewing your document" still meant printing it out, and then going through the red-pen annotations with the author in person, rather than festooning the document file with rectangles of cryptic text in the right margin and emailing it back)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
