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by einpoklum 2063 days ago
> because otherwise I think it would have been Microsoft Word.

No, those are formats with completely different scopes. They don't compete and are essentially non-interchangeable.

> There was a time when papers, books, resumes, contracts, etc. almost always came as Word.

There was never such a time. I mean, sure, you could (and can) send people Word/LibreOffice documents, but things that needed some reproducibility and finality [1] were distributed or published is MS-Word format - almost ever. Postscript used to be pretty popular though.

[1] - Yes, PDFs can be edited too, I know.