peterr@utcsrgv.UUCP (Peter Rowley) (11/29/83)
Re Dick Gillman's comments about Microsoft Word on a floppy: I'm running it on a floppy and find no real trouble at all, though the occasional unexpected disk access, with the associated noise, can be a bit off-putting in a quiet environment. It'd be nice to put the set of files that are so accessed on a RAMdisk, which I believe is possible with DOS 2.0, even using floppies, though my current situation is not annoying enough that I've tried it. Expanding on my previous comments on Word as a whole, I should have said I *really* like it. It has a sophisticated ease-of-use and comprehensive- ness I don't usually associate with software, micro or otherwise. I'll be able to say more once I've used it for a while. It is really nice to have italics, underlining, boldface, double underlining, sub/superscripts, and small caps all displayable on the screen, and nicely printed on an Epson printer. A comment about speed of operation: it's perfectly adequate for my needs, tho' one can notice delays at various points. My impression is that they have made the functionality/performance balance pretty well, meaning that they don't have a lot of cycles left to play with. Contrary to the ridiculous "what's so important about a fast processor?" editorial in a recent PC Tech. J., I think we shall soon see add-on 8086/286 boards attempting to fulfill the demand for extra cycles from Word and, probably more critically from what I've heard, VisiON and similar products. More oomph is certainly going to be needed to push around the bits for the higher-density graphics boards popping up. p. rowley, U. Toronto