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Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975Posted Apr 17, 2012 16:25 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975 by anselm Parent article: Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities
Tell that to Donald Knuth, who came up with TeX in the late 1970s/early 1980s. I'm pretty sure Knuth knows limitations of TeX better then me. It was basically unusable on 72dpi printer. If you had high-quality printer with real double-strike 144dpi mode then yes, it was possible to use TeX - just barely. When 24pin 180dpi/360dpi printers TeX become reality on PC, but it was way too late: WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were the “established standard” by then. Later MS Office replaced them. These scientists certainly gave Microsoft's »engineers« a run for their money. Rilly? You mean in your universe Joe Average uses TeX and not MS Word to print his creations? This is some kind of interesting universe, I must admit. But here and now TeX is historical curiosity (even mathematical journals often use MS Word instead of TeX and general public does not even know TeX exists). Even the 24-pin dot matrix printer I used to have in the 1980s was capable of 360-dpi output in graphics mode, and was actually reasonably fast at 180 dpi. By that time battle was basically already won: in the era of 9-dot matrix printers TeX was doubly unusable (typical computer had no memory to run TeX and 72dpi printer generated unreadable output if you used it) and people used WordPerfect and WordStar. WordPerfect was more popular by far. Later MS Office won the crown (that's why you see so many WordPerfect warts in OOXML), but, of course, it needed compatibility to do that. Which makes the strange printer driver issues even more mystifying considering that, even leaving TeX out of the game, there were various other word processing packages on the market at the time, for different platforms including not just DOS and the Mac but also the Apple II and Atari ST, which managed to produce output on a par with (or surpassing) Word but identically across a range of different output devices. Which ones do you have in mind? How popular they were back then? People rarely moved documents between computers in that era, but quality of the output was important. Even if printers had 144dpi mode it was slow and unreliable. MS Word was actually not widely used (it came later but of course it inherited warts of previous editors), but layout in most popular editors was already dependent on printer driver. Later MS Word needed to keep the status quo to be accepted. The lesson here is simple: scientists may create truly beautiful things… which will be used by other scientists (and scientists wannabe). But engineers produce things for “real users” and this is quite different art.
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Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975 Posted Apr 17, 2012 21:59 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] I'm pretty sure Knuth knows limitations of TeX better then me. It was basically unusable on 72dpi printer. The problem, if there was one at all, wasn't one with TeX – it is really that the Computer Modern fonts (at the time essentially the only game in town) don't look their best on low-resolution output devices, and as far as CM is concerned, 600 dpi is »low resolution«. TeX itself was perfectly capable of producing good-looking output even on 72dpi printers (I think you mean 9-pin dot matrix printers), within the limits of the device, if you were willing to wait for the output. It was also possible to adapt Knuth's line breaking/spacing algorithm from TeX to optimise output on dot matrix printers using the built-in fonts at text-printing speed (the relevant paper was published in Software Practice & Experience, I forget the correct citation); I spent quite a lot of time playing with this, way back then, and always wondered why the word processor people wouldn't pick this up. The popularity (or not) of TeX is a non-issue here; you claimed that it was impossible to produce good-looking output on a low-res device without tying one's software to that device, and I cited TeX as a counter-example. A single counter-example disproves »impossible«. I win. Which ones do you have in mind? In the late '80s I (like many other students at my university) used an Atari ST, and people would always prepare documents at home and print them at the university because the laser printers there were a lot more convenient than the dinky dot matrix printers they had at home. I don't recall people complaining that Signum or StarWriter (the great-great-grandfather of today's LibreOffice) would mess up the formatting when a file was moved from one computer to the other. By that time I was a TeX user, anyway, so it was a non-issue for me. But even earlier on the Apple II it made no difference whether you printed stuff on an Epson FX-80 or a Centronics 737 (which were the two printers I was using at the time); they would look subtly different because the built-in fonts were different, but the spacing, page breaks, etc. would of course be identical – which is something that Word apparently hasn't nailed in 2012.
Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975 Posted Apr 17, 2012 23:10 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] TeX itself was perfectly capable of producing good-looking output even on 72dpi printers (I think you mean 9-pin dot matrix printers), within the limits of the device, if you were willing to wait for the output. You are mixing draft mode (fast, 72dpi, one pass) with NLQ mode (slow, 144dpi, two passes). Cheap printers cheated and had no “real” NLQ at all (they just passed over the same dots the second time - which produced darker picture but kept the resolution @ 72dpi) and more expensive ones were about 5 times slower in NLQ mode thus most documents were printed in draft mode (only letter sent by mail were sometimes printed in NLQ mode). you claimed that it was impossible to produce good-looking output on a low-res device without tying one's software to that device, and I cited TeX as a counter-example Yup. At 72dpi TeX produces unreadable text. You either need to use “large, friendly letters” (often not an option because maximum size of letter was limited) or you needed to use slower 144dpi mode - which was also often not an option (even if you had it on your device it was too slow). A single counter-example disproves »impossible«. Right. But you don't have it. TeX is unusable @ 72dpi thus it's obviously not a proper counter-example. And 72dpi is important: Mac used this dpi on screen - exactly to make it easier to produce best possible WYSIWYG for these printers. But even earlier on the Apple II it made no difference whether you printed stuff on an Epson FX-80 or a Centronics 737 (which were the two printers I was using at the time); they would look subtly different because the built-in fonts were different, but the spacing, page breaks, etc. would of course be identical. Of course these will be identical! They have identical resolutions and identical printer fonts (as far as spacing is concerned). MS Word handles such cases just fine - and always did. It's only when you go from dot-matrix @ 144dpi to dot-matrix @ 360dpi or to laser @ 300✕Ndpi you get real problems. I don't recall people complaining that Signum or StarWriter (the great-great-grandfather of today's LibreOffice) would mess up the formatting when a file was moved from one computer to the other. Not sure about Signum, but StarWriter had the same problem as TeX: it produced ugly-looking documents on low-resolution devices. This was probably one reason for why the students tried to print on laser printer whenever possible. The popularity (or not) of TeX is a non-issue here It's absolutely of the issue here. TeX was not initially popular because it was unusable on low-res output devices and when high-res devices become available people continued to use what they were accustomed to use. 1001st repeat of the same story: scientists claim the won because their solution is more technically advanced and engineers claim they won because they created solution which is actually used by people. Shows the difference between good scientist and good engineer quite nicely, isn't it?
Microsoft: Boiling Frogs Since 1975 Posted Apr 18, 2012 7:03 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] TeX is unusable @ 72dpi thus it's obviously not a proper counter-example. That's what you say. This is what is called the »No true Scotsman« logical fallacy. TeX output at 72dpi is quite readable as far as I'm concerned. Stuff using Computer Modern is not exactly beautiful at 72dpi but that (as I said) is mostly a font problem, not a TeX problem. I spent considerable time in the 1980s writing a DVI previewer for the Atari ST, which had approximately that screen resolution, and it worked fine. TeX was not initially popular because it was unusable on low-res output devices I think that was more to do with the fact that in the early to mid '80s there was no good cheap/free TeX implementation for the PCs of the day. TeX was fine on real computers. Also, TeX was originally meant for typesetting books, not office correspondence, so the observation that it didn't catch on for office correspondence does not detract from the fact that its output was basically OK, which is the original issue.
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