History of Microsoft Word
The first version of Microsoft Word was developed by Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie, former Xerox programmers hired by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1981. Both programmers worked on Xerox Bravo, the first WYSIWYG word processor. The first Word version, Word 1.0, was released in October 1983 for Xenix, MS-DOS, and IBM; it was followed by four very similar versions that were not very successful. The first Windows version was released in 1989, with a slightly improved interface. When Windows 3.0 was released in 1990, Word became a huge commercial success. Word for Windows 1.0 was followed by Word 2.0 in 1991 and Word 6.0 in 1993. Then it was renamed to Word 95 and Word 97, Word 2000 and Word for Office XP. With the release of Word 2003, the numbering was again year-based. Since then, Windows versions include Word 2007, Word 2010, Word 2013, Word 2016, and most recently, Word for Office 365.
In 1986, an agreement between Atari and Microsoft brought Word to the Atari ST. The Atari ST version was a translation of Word 1.05 for the Apple Macintosh; however, it was released under the name Microsoft Write. Unlike other versions of Word, the Atari version was a one-time release with no future updates or revisions. The release of Microsoft Write in 1988 was one of two major PC applications to be released for the Atari ST.
In 2014, the source code for Word for Windows version 1.1a was made available to the Computer History Museum and the public for educational purposes.
Word for DOS
The first Microsoft Word was released in 1983 as Multi-Tool Word at the same time as the first Microsoft Mouse. Costing $395, it featured graphics video mode and mouse support in a WYSIWYG interface. It could run in text mode or graphics mode but the visual difference between the two was minor. In graphics mode, the document and interface were rendered in a fixed font size monospace character grid with italic, bold and underline features that were not available in text mode. It had support for style sheets in separate files.The first version of Word was a 16-bit PC DOS/MS-DOS application. A Macintosh 68000 version named Word 1.0 was released in 1985 and a Microsoft Windows version was released in 1989. The three products shared the same Microsoft Word name, the same version numbers but were very different products built on different code bases. Three product lines co-existed: Word 1.0 to Word 5.1a for Macintosh, Word 1.0 to Word 2.0 for Windows and Word 1.0 to Word 5.5 for DOS.
Word 1.1 for DOS was released in 1984 and added the Print Merge support, equivalent to the Mail Merge feature in newer Word systems.
Word 2.0 for DOS was released in 1985 and featured Extended Graphics Adapter support.
Word 3.0 for DOS was released in 1986.
Word 4.0 for DOS was released in 1987 and added support for revision marks, search/replace by style and macros stored as keystroke sequences. Computer Intelligence estimated that year that Microsoft had 4% of the Fortune 1000 PC word processor market.
Word 5.0 for DOS, released in 1989, added support for bookmarks, cross-references and conditions and loops in macros, remaining backwards compatible with Word 3.0 macros. The macro language differed from the WinWord 1.0 WordBasic macro language.
Word 5.5 for DOS, released in 1990, significantly changed the user interface, with popup menus and dialog boxes. Even in graphics mode, these graphical user interface elements got the monospace ASCII art look and feel found in text mode programs like Microsoft QuickBasic.
Word 6.0 for DOS, the last Word for DOS version, was released in 1993, at the same time as Word 6.0 for Windows and Word 6.0 for Macintosh. Although Macintosh and Windows versions shared the same code base, the Word for DOS was different. The Word 6.0 for DOS macro language was compatible with the Word 3.x-5.x macro language while Word 6.0 for Windows and Word 6.0 for Macintosh inherited WordBasic from the Word 1.0/2.0 for Windows code base. The DOS and Windows versions of Word 6.0 had different file formats.
Word for Windows 1989 to 1995
The first version of Word for Windows was released in November 1989 at a price of USD $498, but was not very popular as Windows users still comprised a minority of the market. The next year, Windows 3.0 debuted, followed shortly afterwards by WinWord 1.1, which was updated for the new OS. The failure of WordPerfect to produce a Windows version proved a fatal mistake. The following year, in 1991, WinWord 2.0 was released which had further improvements and finally solidified Word's marketplace dominance. WinWord 6.0 came out in 1993 and was designed for the newly released Windows 3.1.The early versions of Word also included copy protection mechanisms that tried to detect debuggers, and if one was found, it produced the message "The tree of evil bears bitter fruit. Only the Shadow knows. Now trashing program disk." and performed a zero seek on the floppy disk.
After MacWrite, Word for Macintosh never had any serious rivals, although programs such as Nisus Writer provided features such as non-continuous selection, which were not added until Word 2002 in Office XP.
Word 5.1 for the Macintosh, released in 1992, was a very popular word processor, owing to its elegance, relative ease of use and feature set. However, version 6.0 for the Macintosh, released in 1994, was widely derided, unlike the Windows version. It was the first version of Word based on a common code base between the Windows and Mac versions; many accused the Mac version of being slow, clumsy and memory intensive.
The Windows and Macintosh Word development teams merged after Word for Windows 2.0. With the release of Word 6.0 in 1993 Microsoft again attempted to synchronize the version numbers and coordinate product naming across platforms; this time across the three versions for DOS, Macintosh, and Windows. There may have also been thought given to matching the current version 6.0 of WordPerfect for DOS and Windows, Word's major competitor. However, this wound up being the last version of Word for DOS. In addition, subsequent versions of Word were no longer referred to by version number, and were instead named after the year of their release, once again breaking the synchronization.
When Microsoft became aware of the Year 2000 problem, it released the entire DOS port of Microsoft Word 5.5 instead of getting people to pay for the update. As of March 2024, it is still available for download from Microsoft's web site.
Word 6.0 was the second attempt to develop a common code base version of Word. The first, code-named Pyramid, had been an attempt to completely rewrite the existing product. It was abandoned when Chris Peters replaced Jeff Raikes as the general manager of the Word group and determined it would take the development team too long to rewrite and then catch up with all the new capabilities that could have been added in the same time without a rewrite. Therefore, Word 6.0 for Windows and Macintosh were both derived from Word 2.0 for Windows code base. The Word 3.0 to 5.0 for Windows version numbers were skipped in order to keep the version numbers consistent between Macintosh and Windows versions. Supporters of Pyramid claimed that it would have been faster, smaller, and more stable than the product that was eventually released for Macintosh, and which was compiled using a beta version of Visual C++ 2.0 that targets the Macintosh, so many optimizations have to be turned off, and sometimes use the Windows API simulation library included. Pyramid would have been truly cross-platform, with machine-independent application code and a small mediation layer between the application and the operating system.
More recent versions of Word for Macintosh are no longer ported versions of Word for Windows.
Later versions of Word have more capabilities than merely word processing. The drawing tool allows simple desktop publishing operations, such as adding graphics to documents.
Write for Atari ST
In 1986, Atari announced an agreement with Microsoft to bring Microsoft Write to the Atari ST. The agreement was first teased by Compute!'s Atari ST Disk & Magazine in October 1986 via the rumors & gossip section reporting, "Mum's The Word: At this writing, Atari is expected to soon announce a major software deal with a big-name software company--one of the biggest, in fact. If the deal goes through, it should turn a lot of heads and gain new respect for Atari and the ST. Even the Macintosh and IBM people will be impressed. Sorry, but we promised not to reveal any more about this one."Atari ST User’s Mike Cowley commented on the enthusiasm within the industry regarding the agreement between Atari and Microsoft writing, “It is not just the provision of the package that is being seen as a coup by Atari, but the fact that it carries with it an endorsement for the ST from such a powerful company. “You could compare it with a blessing from the Pope”, observed one industry pundit.” ST-Log’s D.F. Scott offered a thoughtful insight on the impact of the agreement, “Superior or mediocre, Atari has scored a victory in acquiring Microsoft's assistance. There's only one microcomputer I can name, to date, which has thrived without being somehow shaped by the hand of Bill Gates at Microsoft, and it is the ST. That should be an indication of the machine's strength-it has independence, not "compatibility."
For the 1988 holiday shopping season, STart magazine reported Atari bundling Microsoft Write with a couple of their Atari ST packages including an Atari Mega ST 2 package for $2995 and an Atari 520STFM monochrome package for $699.
Microsoft Write for the Atari ST retailed at $129.95 and is one of two high-profile PC word processors that were released on the Atari platform. The other application is WordPerfect. Getting Microsoft Word and WordPerfect on the Atari ST platform was considered a big win for Atari as during the ST era Atari was trying to downplay their videogames image and reimagine itself as a serious business computer brand as it competed against the PC and Macintosh markets. Leonard Tramiel boasted of Microsoft and WordPerfect Corporation's involvement on the Atari ST platform saying, "You don't get much bigger names than those." STart would declare, “The two most talked-about programs under development are Microsoft Write and WordPerfect.”
Microsoft Write also featured a "Help Screen" tool to help a user explore the advanced features of the word processor. STart praised the help screen feature stating that “Write's online help screens are a significant aid: their form and presentation should be seriously studied by other ST developers. Each help screen doesn't just list the commands, it actually explains how to use the program in easily understood language.”
STart's Ian Chadwick wrote, "To put Write into perspective, it is basically a decent GEM-based word processor, but at a price that puts it above most of its competitors." Writing in Antic, Gregg Pearlman commented, "You could call Write a "full-featured" word processor. It's GEM-based and it can run under GDOS. It can use any of several fonts in a WYSIWYG format. It has a search-and-replace feature as well as cut-and-paste, and a visible copy buffer called the Clipboard." Atari ST User described Microsoft Write in their ST User Software Buyer’s Guide as, “Easy-to-use GDOS document processor. Very reminiscent of the Macintosh in places.” Atari Explorer's John Jainschigg wrote, "All in all, Microsoft Write is a powerful, flexible, and genuinely easy-to-use word processor appropriate for business, professional, and academic writing."
In 1990 Atari ST User would reminisce about the 1986 agreement milestone that brought Word to the Atari ST writing, "Four Years Ago: Atari announces that US software giant Microsoft, is to produce an ST version of their Macintosh document processor, Microsoft Word. The ST package, to be called Microsoft Write, was said at the time to signify the ST's arrival as a serious business tool."