I hate word processing nowadays. Like big science, it's become less romantic and all-embracing and more practical and dull. Microsoft Word essentially ended the innovative battle between Word, WordPerfect, Nissus Writer, WordStar, WriteNow, and others by pre-installing itself on OEM machines or offering financially petty corporate-wide upgrades from its retarded stepbrother, Works. With leverage like Windows and the cash reserves of Microsoft behind it, how could it lose? It couldn't.

Word was not the best of the bunch. Review the magazine comparisons of the time - it was nearly always considered to be dead average. An imitator, not an innovator. Nissus tended to be the harbinger of new ideas, WordStar was popular with secretaries who knew all its arcane shortcuts, and for young WYSIWYG slobs like myself, WriteNow was the perfect aesthetic blend of a capable and useful technical foundation and legendary ease-of-use that, in my opinion, remains unsurpassed to this day. It was quirky, told you interesting statistics about the document you were working on, stayed out of your way when you had a brainstorm, and never ever crashed.

I did all my early writing in WriteNow for the Mac. T/Maker eventually bought them, and it was the beginning of the end for a product in the philosophical vein of Dark Castle, Beagle Basic, and Adventure Construction Set. It neither treated you like an imbecile (no tooltips or popup help of any kind), nor deluged you with "features" only a specialist would require. For a novice writer, a poet, a penpal - for any plain Jane who wanted to write things and print them just the way they looked onscreen - it was a gem. That is why it had to die.

Microsoft Word today is a behemoth program on the order of 100 times the size, disk- and memorywise, of the simple but effective WriteNow. Yet what does it do better for me? Very little. Style sheets, spelling and grammar-on-the-fly (which I immediately disable) and some other professional tools (version tracking, highlighted markups, or SmartTags anyone?) are sometimes useful, but they tend to be buried in nested menus full of editorial and programmatic (XML) jargon reaching far above my pond waders, and too often, I just don't bother. I now write in a plaintext Notepad-like program and format within my blog or PDF document. It shouldn't be this way. Yes, I know all about the separation of content and formatting (Docbook, LaTex), but for MY purposes, I want something simple and fun to use, not just theoretically clean. WriteNow was a great program that has now trapped many of my stories, poems and essays within its proprietary confines, leaving me the unenviable chore of conversion not only from one word processor to another, but also to another OS. This is non-trivial if you care about style at all.

I long for the days when computing was fun. When you could play Crystal Quest for hours spurred on by that vaguely erotic "ahHHh" sound as you completed the level. When Tetris was new. When intellectually gifted individuals wrote games like The Fool's Errand and Balance of Power almost entirely on their own. When even I could dabble in a gambling program or text adventure. And when getting ideas out of your head and on to the screen (and then onto paper) was fun and straightforward, the mainstay of cottage publishing firms around the country. The closest thing we have now are blogs, which are great by the way. But when I fire up Word to compose a poem for the ages, and realize it will probably not even be properly readable by the next version of the same program, well, let's just say I feel less like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and more like Max Headroom. Computing moves so fast that standards have no meaning.

Sure, the salad days of maverick computing are over, but I still hope someone topples the monopoly that is Word, whose bland title reflects its monolithic architecture. I don't want to write "words" for a living, I want to write art - and for that I need to feel comfortable and inspired. I need less artifice and more intuition. I don't care about being able to draw a table and export it to Excel or PowerPoint, but I would like to know the average reading level of my essay or the exact word count at any given moment. Hackers of the world unite! Take down Microsoft Office once and for all and bring life back to the realm of content creation. In the meantime, I shall use my Moleskine lined journal and Parker ballpoint pen to manifest my inner muse, and Microsoft's proprietary, do-it-all Frankenstein application shall never touch what I write.