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?