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A comment on Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Archimedes. Parent comment

Re:Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Arch... by DrBazza on Tuesday September 24, 2024 @11:06AM (#41637332)
Back when the Arch came out with a full desktop environment, the typical PC was MS or DR DOS with TUI based WordPerfect. The full GUI Impression word processor was released in 1989, about the same time as the first version of Word for Windows, but was much, much, better (having used both side-by-side when I was a school kid). Also, RISC OS didn't BSOD.

But, anyway, it's all might-have-beens.

My point, really, is that any business in the US has a massive head-start because of economies of scale. States the size of European countries, less punitive taxes, and a single language for almost 400m make for a large market. It's just a shame Acorn wasn't based there.

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Re:Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Arch... by pasc1878 on Tuesday September 24, 2024 @01:22PM (#41638825)
Word for windows was a port from Mac which was earlier.

However my point was that IBM PC had won by 1986 - all business used that. Anything else was hobbyists only except Macs for publishing.

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Re:Fully documented source code for Lander on the Acorn Arch... by lproven on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @06:18AM (#41645714)
No, Excel was the Mac-to-PC port. Word was already native on the Mac very early on, and that line ended with Word 5.1A, which to many people -- including me -- is the classic Macintosh version. PowerPoint too, but that was acquired: it's not an MS in-house project.

Word for Windows 6 is the point where the Mac and PC codebases converged. And, FWIW, it did so by porting the Windows version to a MacOS Windows-like component library, and Mac users hated it.

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