Yeah dude, back in the Dizzy, I think they even ported to OS/2! Loved OS/2 once you got it set up, but if something happened in that ridiculously big 500 line config.sys file, their default editor had no line count, so you'd get "bad instruction set in line 327" and you have to 1,2,3,4.....'til you got to 327 and then try to figure out what the heck was going on.

As for WAY back in the Dizzy, again, first computer was the TI994A and took awhile before my mother dropped coin on a tape drive for it so you could save your programs...wow......now to go back just a scant 9 or 10 years ago...(man, I'm getting old) there used to be ways to back up your PC w/ your VCR (tape back up fo the masses) never did it but fun to think of....now in the day of cheap chinese everything, grab an external drive for $120 and back up to disk. Nice!

Back to the M$FT Office tingy though, another viable alternative is all the online free office offerings, during the AJAX glut of apps that came out a couple years back and then Google started collecting some of the more notable ones, now you can go to any machine w/ a Java VM in it's browser and roll in that fashion. The editor and spreadsheets are remarkably robust and usable. So those w/ Gmail accounts start looking in the upper left hand corner of the browser and start playing w/ those (the calendaring offering is compatible with Outlook so you can send and accept invites to and from outlook. Google's doing an excellent job of chipping away and freeing up the computing environment, couple this with capable $200 dollar workstations, PS3s, etc.....there may be desktop choice in our time. People used to laugh at me with Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox then people started to realize it was less susceptible to hijacking.....just takes time..I'll get off the pulpit now! ;-)