Holy cow, I wrote a book!
Back in the late 1990s, some large Internet association conducted a survey in order to bestow awards in categories like Best Web server and Best Web browser, and one of the categories was Best Web authoring tool.
We didn't find out about this until the organization contacted the Windows team and said, "Hi, we would like to present Microsoft with the award for Best Web authoring tool. Please let us know who the author of Notepad is, so that we can invite them to the award ceremony."
Yup, Notepad won the award for Best Web authoring tool.
The mail went out to the team. "Hey, does anybody remember who wrote Notepad?"
Even a decade ago, the original authorship of Notepad was lost to the mists of time. I think the person who ended up going was the original author of the multi-line edit control, since that's where the guts of Notepad lie.
How is this possible? Notepad is, quite possibly, the best software ever to come out of Microsoft. And now you tell me that nobody knows who wrote it? Unbelievable.
I wish I worked at a company where writing a simple UI control made me eligible for an award...
I have read that with a lathe, you can make any other machine tool (and if it comes to it, you can scale up a lathe from a piece of string and wooden stock, and bootstrap yourself to a metalworking lathe out of increasingly harder materials - something to remember if you are dropped back in time to before the industrial revolution). Who invented the lathe? I dunno; but I am perfectly copacetic to acknowlege Notepad as the lathe of programming.
post-emptive snarky comment:
Probably the only other contender was FrontPage. That would make the decision very understandable.
@jmarkp:
The edit control is probably one of the more complicated UI elements you could write though. Not as complicated as RichEdit, but up there.
Must have been before source control was used. Otherwise, it would be easy to use blame to find who should get the honor.
@oliver: Probably the only other contender was FrontPage. That would make the decision very understandable.
I was editing HTML in emacs html-mode in 1995. I'm pretty sure that was easier than doing it in Notepad. Adobe PageMill was already released on the Mac, and for the non-coder, was much better than either.
Notepad is great for quick viewing and editting of text files, and pretty awful for anything else.
I have a hard time trying to understand, how anyone would give notepad a price for "Best Web authoring tool" or anything else.
Don't misunderstand me, notepad is great for what it is - a simple editor to view text files, but that's it.
The only price I'd give it, would be for simplicity - imho it's not even in the same league as emacs and co.
I always preferred the Mac version of Notepad, where the pages were auto-saved when you closed the program and you could type several pages worth of notes.
When I moved to Windows, it always bugged the crap out of me that Notepad bugged me to save the document-- Notepads are supposed to auto-save! Text editors ask you to save! (The distinction between the two never existed in the Windows world, I guess, like the distinction between "Return" and "Enter" on the keyboard.)
I wrote a quickie .net app to do the same in Windows if anybody's interested: http://blakeyrat.com/jamespad/
Haven't implemented drag&drop or printing yet.
Henke37: Notepad was written in 1983. Does your company keep change logs going back that far?
@James Schend Try OneNote, it does what you are describing.
But I always recommend vim for HTML editing. Much more powerful than Notepad, and with syntax-highlighting it's just about perfect.
That would make "vi" the best program development tool then.
@GWO:
I suspect that the award was based on size of userbase rather than anything else. Most Windows-based web developers have tried Notepad at least once. The other tools have fragmented mindshare.
This is also why Pizza Pizza keeps getting voted the best pizzeria in Toronto. They have franchise locations everywhere, so everyone's had Pizza Pizza. Anything better is either not on the ballot, or splitting the vote on the ballot. There's far better pizza out there, but the customer base for better pizzerias is very fragmented.
I'm pretty sure that "notepad" in this context was meant as a journalistic shorthand for "your favorite plain-text editor" -- because much of the readership would have no general idea what a plain-text editor *is*. Saying "notepad" is probably the most effective way of getting that concept across to an unsophisticated readership of which the majority has never even heard about vi or Emacs.
The point is not that notepad.exe is better for writing HTML than Emacs -- which it isn't by any reasonable metric -- but that *any* plain text editor is preferable (or was, at that time) over a specialized HTML tool that tried to isolate the author from the actual markup.
i knew the original author when I was PM in win2k. He was in the printing test group
dont recall his name