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▲ WillAdams 2 hours ago

Probably the most annoying bug I ever encountered was in Quark Xpress 7 when in a two-column layout, placing a discretionary hyphen in a paragraph on the right-hand column caused a preceding paragraph on the left-hand column to reflow to a different number of lines. I tried to get Quark to look into it (it was perfectly repeatable) --- when they wouldn't, I pulled a couple of all-nighters over a weekend and shifted the entire project to InDesign.

That said, as a counter-point, there were also applications such as WriteNow which was ~100,000 lines of hand-coded assembly, which was quick and performant even on an 8MHz 68000 Mac Plus --- it flew on a 25MHz NeXT Cube (it was originally developed as a possible advanced MacWrite/replacement for it if it didn't ship, then was contracted by NeXT to make a bundled word-processor)

https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model_The_Finder....

▲mspreij 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Thank you for that link :-) I miss the old MacOS, often..

▲WillAdams an hour ago | parent [-]

It was simply a magical thing in the early days, and one wonders how things would have turned out if for instance we had had MacBasic instead of HyperCard:

https://folklore.org/MacBasic.html

https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html https://www.folklore.org/Evolution_of_a_classic.html

(and it kind of kills me that there isn't a book on the history of HyperCard --- a quick search did turn up:

https://www.taskade.com/blog/hypercard-history

which seems promising (if a bit self-serving and possibly AI-generated.... will have to find time to read)