Here's one I love to show people who tell me how wonderful M$Office is. Get on a DOS/Win computer and create a text file. For example:
C:\> copy con stuff.txt
this file is just stuff
^z
You have created a 22 byte file. Open the file in Word97. Make NO changes to the file whatsoever. No formatting changes, no text changes, nothing. Save it in "word document format." Then do a "dir stuff.*"
You will find stuff.txt is 22 bytes and stuff.doc is 19,456 bytes. Pretty darn efficient
.
Of course you could then copy those two files to a floppy and try to read them on various platforms... like DOS without using Word (or even an older version of Word). You could read stuff.txt, but not even see a single text character of stuff.doc. Opening stuff.txt with Word6 instead of Word97 would give you an error message and no way to open the file. You could read stuff.txt in Linux with a simple "cat stuff.txt" or "more stuff.txt" but you'd see nothing in stuff.doc.
Great stuff! How the hell did such a crappy bloated office suite ever manage to become the standard?
