When you can write nearly perfect versions of PacMan and Space Invaders in your favorite productivity application, you know it’s crossed the boundary. Of course, treating cells like pixels and implementing the game by changing the background colors probably wasn’t what the Excel developers had in mind, but frankly, that’s not much different than what the guys writing the original games had to deal with.
It’s Official — Office is an ‘Operating System’
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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http://www.geocities.jp/nchikada/pac/
Is this working with OpenOffice as well?
I tried to load the pacman document with OO but couldn’t find out how to start the game…
> Is this working with OpenOffice as well?
No, it requires VBA, which isn’t in OOo. 🙁
Clarification: The ” 🙁 ” above was because it doesn’t work in OOo, not because OOo doesn’t include VBA. 😉
Mozilla has APIs that allow you to program to it, it is not an OS.
it is called MIDDLEWARE!!!!
Theres a cool easter egg in the MS spread sheet program, it does this cool 3D terrain thingy. That spread sheet program is a lot more powerful than most people use it for!
Huh? An OS just because it has a language/scripting system/API? No. That does not make an OS, not even remotely. That’s like saying every language system you can run on Windows or Linux is an OS itself. There are some systems- Squeak Smalltalk and Inferno’s Limbo for instance- that can run on top of another OS, be an OS themselves, and provide a programming system or API.
MS Office has a pretty extensive scripting system, Visual Basic for Applications. It can do a lot of what regular VB can do.
Also, regarding questions of whether this could be ported to OpenOffice- yes, but it would have to be ported. It’d take work. OOo/SO has a BASIC scripting language built-in too, not unlike VBA, although it feels a bit more primitive. I’ve always wondered why more folks don’t use OpenOffice’s BASIC system as a “VB for Linux,” which people are always clamoring for. I don’t have an OOo install here, but I seem to recall it even has a GUI builder.
And no, that’s not what is called “middleware.” (or “MIDDLEWARE!!!!” for that amtter) See < http://www.cren.net/crenca/glossary/cpglossary.html > for a definition. If you take that definition very liberally you could say almost any software is middleware, but that’s not what is intendent.
or if you take a very narrow definition of it Middleware is very very specialized software, which it is not.
Middleware is any application that exposes its own APIs to a developer, thus abstracting the OS.
JVM is Middleware, Mozilla/Netscape is Middleware, and Office with all its VBA APIs is Middleware.
I tried but it bitched about macro signing. Oh well.
Yes Excell 97 had the moon flight deal in it. Pretty niffty.
I would say that MS Office is as much an operating system as emacs.
It would have worked except for the dependency on the winmm.dll (for sound I suppose). I could probably remove that dependency and make it work.
If having a couple games written for Office makes it an operating system (which I dispute), then what does that make Emacs?
Emacs must be a super-OS! heh. Emacs actually os a bit closer to an OS than Office; using something like OSKit to add a driver layer and such and emacs could actually run as an OS. So much of the code in Emacs reproduces toolkit and what would often be kernel- and OS-level code. Whereas Office uses the actual OS and what it provides- MFC, Win32 API, etc etc. Yes, Emacs has to rely on the OS-level API to an exent, but a lot of it is built-in- it just needs a framebuffer.
MuchoMacho: Haha. I hope that was toungue-in-cheek. If it just ran the code without signing then someone would be (rightly, in that case) bitching about how insecure MS Office was to run any macro without having any sort of signing or verifiying that it’s legit. Mmmm, macro viruses!
well?
I once wrote a WordPerfect 5.1 macro that played tetris very well, on a 8086 🙂 I still have it.
joking about playing pacman on Excel …
And somebody goes and does it. Well done!
“If having a couple games written for Office makes it an operating system (which I dispute), then what does that make Emacs?”
Simple. Office would be win 3.1, and Emacs would be Linux 2.6.
An operating system manages the hardware and the processor. Office does not have a kernel to do this. It runs on top of Windows: an application.
At minimum, it’s an operating environment: just what Windows <9x were.
>I’ve always wondered why more folks don’t use OpenOffice’s
>BASIC system as a “VB for Linux,” which people are always
>clamoring for. I don’t have an OOo install here, but I seem
>to recall it even has a GUI builder.
For the same reason you don’t see hordes of websites with OOo macros ready to download. NO DOCUMENTATION in the OOo help system!
In my days, we called such a thing a platform.
Now I know why people want to run M$ Office on Linux =O)
The only prob i found is trying to quit the game half way through doesn’t seem to work…. I guess there’s a key to do it but I’m of the mentality – run it first – read the docs later =)
Will Office stand alone and boot and run without Windows Or whatever emulator running underneath it?Thats my definition of a true OS,Lately I have been playing around with M$ BOB which had me intrigued as being described as the “lost” M$ OS,well from what I can tell this puppy was never meant to stand alone, it’s just a shell designed to run on top of some form of windows, and I see nothing in the installation to run it in place of windows or stand -alone,but my 10 yr old daughter just loves it.with it’s virtual doll house design and the cute little doggie host,MS really missed the boat on this one,It should have been marketed with the younger user in mind and bundled with some more educational software and games inside,I’ll bet they would have sold billions of these things,instead they stuffed it full of checkbook balancers and home management tips and the whole thing is laughable to an adult,Duh!?I plan on building her a Box running BOB on top of win95 or 98 with a bunch of games and educational stuff and scrapping all the adult crap, an OS it’s not but It’s a nice shell for a little kids as Office is a nice shell for Business types
That’s my geek project Xmas gift suggestion for the year,Grab an old PI laptop off ebay for less than 100 bucks,slap one of those old win95 distros you have lying around on it,load it full of free DOS games and free educational software available on the net,grab a copy of MS BOB off ebay for less than $20 load it on there and set it to boot to BOB and make the Icons for the games and stuff inside BOB,and give it to your or a freind or relative’s little one and watch their eyes light up on Xmas!!this is a little off topic but I couldn’t resist