. . . I am Microsoft-free, have been for years at least 10 . . .
My sign shop in the big bad rotten Apple was declared a Microsoft free zone somewhere between Win3.0 and Win95. MSWorks for DOS was great, especially on my PB100 under SoftPC before the ClarisWorks release. Even after that, I missed the rodent free command key structure. the System 6-7 UI was badly hampered by the guidelines prohibiting such for things as simple as Save As, IMO. Alt-F-A is still more convenient/quicker than Command/Shift/S.
It was also an Helvetica free zone, which got a reaction from every DTP jockey I ever met.
On a more serious, on topic note: was the UI for Office in the OS9 age as horribly cluttered as it is today? I recently had to activate the somnolent beast on my dedicated, ostracized WWWworkstation just to use an Excel file. I don't understand how a spreadsheet could possibly need that much crud up there? Maybe I need 2001 as well, especially if I could do a monolithic install of Excel.
n00b here: are tangential questions and commentary like mine OK or bad form over here?