a day ago
- The author enjoyed early word processors like WordPerfect, which made typing easier than typewriters by allowing deletion and paragraph rearrangement.
- Word processing evolved from simple typewriter proxies to complex publishing suites, with .doc files using a Compound File Binary Format (a mini FAT filesystem) that often corrupted due to non-atomic operations.
- Corruption was common because .doc files stored a mini filesystem inside a file, and crashes during saves could leave inconsistent structures, leading to unreadable files.
- Users had to periodically 'Save As' to force clean writes, as .doc files bloated with deleted data and internal fragmentation increased corruption risk.
- The shift to .docx (2007) replaced binary blobs with ZIP archives containing XML files, making content recoverable by extracting the archive, but Microsoft's OOXML specification was excessively complex (5,039-page PDF), criticized as a deliberate barrier to interoperability.
- The rise of cloud-based tools like Google Docs and Markdown (via GitHub, Slack, etc.) reduced reliance on desktop word processors, as Markdown offered simple, universal, browser-viewable plain text with no structural corruption risk.
- Markdown won because it prioritizes words and structure over advanced formatting, is learnable in minutes, works on any device, and produces files that remain readable indefinitely.