acmdas

Back in '85-6 I developed training for USDA (using Dan Bricklin's Demo) for a curses version of Word 5 that ran on 3B2s with SysV v2. I'd be very happy to see that ported to Linux or one of the BSDs.

In fact, I'd love to see both Word and Excel '98 on one of my workstations. IMHO things went South after that.

I had to use Windows and Office off and on with clients up to 2010 and I'm sure that Excel provided some important edge-case functionality after '98, but for me the UI went steadily to sh*t.

Perhaps the title would be more accurate if it were "The way my friends and I prefer to think of it, the age of the universe is nearly twice as old as we used to like to think of it."

Perhaps one could say, "It was clear who was right and who was wrong--whichever side you were on, that side was right and the other side was wrong" whichever struggle is being considered. Whichever faction you identified with was right, just like now.

Illinois manages to be as much as 55% blue because Cook County/Chicago overwhelmingly votes Democrat, and always has.

Chicago (Cook County) went 83% for Clinton in 2016, 74% for Obama in 2012, 76% for Obama in 2008, 79% for Kerry in 2004 and 68% for Gore in 2000. Biden's 2020 numbers were on the low side of average for a Democrat candidate there, probably didn't involve an unusual number of independents or disaffected Republicans...

History rather suggests that both antecedents will occur, assured or not. MS isn't known for keeping tools around for decades.

Agree wholeheartedly with your (a) and (b), and would add:

(c) Emacs won't disappear after a few years (where "few" can mean decades if your career lasts that long - mine ran from 1967 to 2011 and I still use emacs daily) the way virtually every (or maybe every) "more intuitive" editor/environment will, given time. Your investment in learning it will really pay off.

While I've been a "geek" since I joined IBM in 1967, I've been primarily a writer for at least 35 years. In that time, I've used Wordstar, WordPerfect, literally every flavour of MS Word up to 2011, vi, iTerm and emacs.

I've converted files of one format to another to another to another, and finally to ASCII text and that is that. No more orphaning as one or another company goes out of business or decides to update their file format.

My editor now is Emacs and, depending on who/what I'm writing for I use plain text, or org or md if I need to include basic formatting. I've published enough to know that I'm a wordsmith, not an artist and going beyond basic formatting is a job for a typographic artist, which I'm not.

I know that makes me a grumpy old fart, as does my refusal to rely on The Cloud (i.e., Somebody Else's Computer) for backups, and so be it. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice (or more), shame on me.

Wrong type of Bugatti - I was hoping that it would be a Type 35 or something of that ilk. Too bad.

There seem to be a lot of Apple users who wouldn't agree. My MacBook Pro is early 2011 so I haven't been able to use the newest, but I can't say that each upgrade from Lion to High Sierra was clearly an improvement for my use cases (writing and coding). YMMV.

Can't help thinking of the Yogi Berra quote (whether he said it or not), "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

Seems like there are a lot of folks interested in blogging support, considering that nobody reads blogs anymore.

I love my 2011 MacBook Pro's hardware - the case, the keyboard, the hinges. I liked OS-X Lion just fine, and every update since then has seemed to be a downgrade...I still need to use the 2011 Office I bought then now and then, or I'd have converted it to Debian years ago.

I've remained informed about these issues without frequenting any "news" sources. Government, hospital, pharmacy sites all provide that without the "clickbait" factor (or at least with much less).

"engine fires..." not gas tanks.