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Comment by jbullock35 | Hacker News Reader

People who weren't alive at the time may not appreciate how different the commercial app ecosystem was: how many more options, how much less concentrated.

Here is a PC Magazine cover from 1988: https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1988-02-29. It boasts a review of 55 different word processors. All of them would have been commercial; none of it was free, let alone open-source.

It wasn't just word processors. Here is a different cover: https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1988-05-17. It boasts tests of 43 different consumer-level database products. And magazine covers like these two weren't extraordinary.

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If you compare word processors to note taking apps of today which I think are very equivalent to the same use you'll find more than 55 tools. Word processors belong to an era where the computer replaced the typewriter and it's not needed any more these days. You can find commercial, free or open source note taking apps that are local or cloud based and offer a huge variety of features.

"If you compare word processors to note taking apps of today which I think are very equivalent to the same use"

Are they really equivalent though? A word processor - with multi-page documents, pagination, rich formatting and layout, footnotes, headers, footers, ToC (table of contents) and so much more - seems a magnitude greater than simply a note-taking app.

I can understand why many developers might tackle a simple note app (or a simple blog generator, or static site generator). But a word processor feels like a much more complex beast.

All of that complexity has been replaced by sync (e.g., collaborative editing as one example of). Sync is the problem of our era and it branches out in many directions (e.g., infinitely restorable, branching, searchable history).

In general commercial note-taking apps are not at all simple; they have similar features to those you named. Also consider that automatic syncing across devices (at least, if not also across platforms) is practically a sine qua non, which is complex it its own right.

I do wonder whether note-taking apps will condense over time too though, as our phones continue to become bigger extensions of our intellectual activity.

You could likely more than 55 open source text editors too. I could name at least 15 offhand, I think.

That's a good comparison also to the word processors of the 80's.

Those annual PC Magazine Best Printer of 19XX that weighed the same as a tome - but they really tested in depth - now we just go to the local PC store and buy a crappy $99 inkjet on special from HP/Epson or Canon.

To be fair, the crappy $99 inkjet these days is a much better machine than even 10 years ago. I got mine for free locally because the market is so saturated (used at least), which is great for the consumer. It has a scanner. It can connect to my computer or my cell phone wirelessly. I don't have to turn it on, feed in paper, and open some flaps or anything like that before use to ensure the ink doesn't dry out when I'm not printing. I just hit print on my device and it fires up in the next room from its sleep state. Putting in just the black ink turned it on black ink only mode automatically, my old inkjets on the other hand would moan about missing some colors, or protest by doing strange things like printing out a black and white document using only the yellow ink on the white page. It's also remarkably quiet compared to my ancient inkjets, which made my home sound like a machine shop when I printed out a few pages. Time will tell how it holds up over the years, but barring anything catastrophic, printing might now be a solved thing for me.

Exactly. I was recently considering a purchase of an ink jet printer for a specific purpose that requires very high black ink resolution. (I already have a laser printer, but its real resolution is 1200dpi). It was next to impossible to find the real black ink specs of few cheap printers available. Numbers like 5000dpi are being thrown around, but it is impossible to find out what they actually mean before you buy and test the product by yourself.

The market became commodified and the need to test to find adequate products evaporated.

It was certainly a more creative time, at a time of expensive computers and restricted resources

It was a time of evolutionary explosion. And while I don't miss a lot of the aspects of it, it is certainly nostalgic in a lot of ways

(though I'm not the type to play with 80s hardware - emulators are more practical)

Oh and about the "none of it was free" well ;)

God, flipping through those magazines brings a tear of nostalgia to my eye. Those were such different days.

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