The dominant word processing program for personal computers in the 1980s was DOS-based WordPerfect. Microsoft Word for DOS, which had been released in 1983, was an also-ran.
That situation changed dramatically with the introduction of Microsoft Word for Windows in 1989. By 1993 it was generating 50% of the word processing market revenue, and by 1997 it was up to 90%. 1
The market shares of various word processors in the 80's and 90's.
These license terms are an agreement between Microsoft Clearly there was something extraordinary about Word for Windows. Part of its success was due to Microsoft’s marketing acumen. But it was also a stunning technical achievement, and its ability to run on ordinary PCs created the first popular vanguard of the new graphics-oriented style of document preparation.
Remember, this was a time when a typical personal computer might have an 8 Mhz processor, 1 megabyte of memory, a 20 megabyte hard disk, and a floppy disk drive. How did Word accomplish so much with so little?
There’s only one way to understand the magic in detail: read the code. With the permission of Microsoft Corporation, the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code of Word for Windows version 1.1a as it was on January 10, 1991. This material is © Copyright by Microsoft.
The 7 MB zip file contains 1021 files in 33 folders. In the root directory there is a “readme” file that briefly explains the rest of the contents. Most of it is source code in C, but there are also text documents, x86 assembler-language source files, executable tools, batch files, and more.
To access this material you must agree to the terms of the license displayed here, which permits only non-commercial use and does not give you the right to license it to third parties by posting copies elsewhere on the web.
Other historical source code releases in this series include IBM’s APL programming language, Apple II DOS, Adobe’s Photoshop, Apple Macpaint/QuickDraw, and Microsoft’s MSDOS. If you would like us to do more of this, please consider supporting the museum’s efforts by making a donation. We are a 501©3 non-profit organization.
In the dark ages of computer word processing, what you wrote (and saw on the screen, if you had one) was cryptic formatting commands embedded within the text, like this:
.nf
.ll 4.0i
.in 2.0i
101 Main Street
Morristown, NJ 07960
15 March, 1997
.sp 1i
.in 0
Dear Sir,
.fi
.ti 0.25i
I just wanted to drop you a note to thank you…
After “compiling” and printing, you finally saw the result – which often wasn’t what you wanted. Make changes. Try again.
The emergence of WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) word processors changed all that. The screen showed what the final document would look like, and keyboard commands you used changed the look of the text, not a programming script.
Charles Simonyi at Xerox PARC in 1980
One of the first such programs was BRAVO, created in 1974 by Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi and others at Xerox PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, for the groundbreaking Alto computer. Simonyi later said,