Tuesday, June 25, 2013

My Brief History of Computers late 80s and early 90's

For all you generations Xers and Y'ers, here's my personal history of computers.

In the eighties some computers used tape drives to load files because hard drives were too expensive. You really needed some patience for the tape to load because it took forever! Trust me, this was a painful experience.

And then floppies were the rage. My first Mac SE was really awesome because it had TWO floppies..one was used to load the operating system, the other was used for applications and files. This meant you didn't have to continually swap floppies whenever the operating system needed some data. So awesome!

At that point we were making the transition to 2400 baud modems, which was really great compared to the 1200 baud modems. Some 9600 baud modems were available but they were hard to get to work and gave a lot of errors. Plus they were sooo expensive...around $1000.

And then in the early 90's my Mac IIsi was really fast...I bought a 60 megabyte external drive for $600. And backing it up was simple - just buy a case of 50 floppies and label and swap them in and out when the backup program finished each disk and ejected it.

To be continued...

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Docx File Format History


"Docx" files, or files ending with the extension .docx were introduced in 2007 as the new document format for Microsoft Office.  Open Office XML (OOXML) is the overall file format which covers Microsoft Word, Microsoft Office, PowerPoint, and Microsoft Excel.

The new "docx" file format is a collection of files zipped together to form one overall file. The individual files consist of XML documents, binaries, and supporting files such as ".rels" which holds information on the organization of the files which make up the "docx" file.

This format contrasts sharply with ".doc" files, which is a binary document format in versions of Word prior to 2007. The ".doc" file format is still common because of the number of older machines still in use and the reluctance to upgrade software in a down economy.

This is one reason for the popularity of www.docx2doc.com as many users who receive docx files cannot open the new file format on their older version of Microsoft Word.

The Docx2doc.com Team