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Comment by larsrc | Hacker News Reader

Many old formats were essentially just binary dumps of memory, or something not far removed. Documenting the formats was not a standard. Yes, I agree that there is a social responsibility, but having worked in digital archiving I can tell you that the olden days were really, really messy. No, really.

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This is the point that many of the commenters who criticize Microsoft are missing, and it's why the old formats are not enabled by default (security vulnerabilities) and why it's not as simple as creating a parser.

Microsoft still deserves criticism for designing their old word formats so badly. It was a design choice to turn documents of mostly text into obscure binary formats that were badly standardized and maintained.

Not true at all. Some of Microsoft's best minds created extremely ingenious methods that allowed early word processors to be usable on files that were dramatically larger than what would fit in memory. OSes didn't support suitable performance via VM infrastructure at the time. It was clever, outside of the box thinking that got MS to be able to beat WordPerfect (a worthy competitor) and the many other also-rans.

There was (contrary to popular belief) not a deliberate strategy to limit interoperability. It was simply the reality of the approaches utilized that made them tightly coupled to the MS Word codebase and less standardizable than would have otherwise been ideal.

Source: one of the guys who worked on it at MS.

Word 4.0 ran from floppy disks on PC XTs (8088 CPU) with 320 KB of RAM. You can't afford an elaborate parser in such limited memory, or you'd have to swap out its implementation on floppy on every load and save. Just running the parser would have slowed down document loading significantly. The floppy disk capacity also wasn't much larger. You already had to swap the disks for doing spell checking or similar. For comparison, the first web browser (WorldWideWeb) was an executable of about 1 MB and ran on a much faster 32-bit NeXT computer with 8 MB of RAM and a hard drive.

no they don't.

They were effectively working at embedded scale, trying to capture state within tremendously limiting constraints.

This is a case of interpreting past decisions based on current criteria, when those same conditions would have prevented modern methods from being implemented.

> Microsoft still deserves criticism for designing their old word formats so badly.

I would love to see some modern devs try to write software for a 68000 system with only 512K of memory

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