For decades, Microsoft Word and Windows have felt inseparable. Most people open one through the other, and the two products have been central to Microsoft's identity for so long that it is easy to assume Word was created as the flagship application of Windows. The actual historical record is stranger. Word was already a finished product on store shelves before Microsoft formally announced Windows, and its earliest development did not center on MS-DOS. The first version of Word was designed for Xenix, Microsoft's own Unix variant. Word is therefore one of the clearest surviving artifacts of a more experimental Microsoft, one willing to build software for any operating system that looked like a plausible future.
Microsoft had a Unix phase before Windows
Yes, that Microsoft
Microsoft announcing its own version of Unix sounds like a weird alternate-history detour, but Xenix was very real. Microsoft announced Xenix in August 1980 as a portable Unix system for 16-bit processors. By 1982, the company was already running several Xenix machines on its internal network. Microsoft also worked with the Santa Cruz Operation to develop and support the system across different hardware. At the time, Unix was still mostly an academic and enterprise system, but Xenix gave Microsoft a way to offer Unix to commercial users on the expanding family of 16-bit microprocessors.
Word came out of that version of Microsoft. Charles Simonyi joined the company in 1981 after years at Xerox PARC, where he had worked on Bravo, one of the early WYSIWYG text editors built for the Xerox Alto. He later brought in Richard Brodie, another former Xerox employee, and Brodie started work on Microsoft's new word processor in 1982. The program initially went by the corporate name Multi-Tool Word. The UK National Archives' PRONOM database says Simonyi and Brodie developed it first for Xenix in February 1983, with a version for MS-DOS, Microsoft's pre-Windows disk operating system, following later that year. Brodie has also said that the first version was developed on Xenix, although that does not necessarily prove the Xenix build was the first sold commercially. Either way, Word's earliest development happened on Unix.
Microsoft gave the DOS release a fairly aggressive debut. Its corporate timeline says Word for MS-DOS 1.00 shipped on September 29, 1983, with a demo copy sent to PC World subscribers, while the Computer History Museum puts the number of demo disks distributed at roughly 450,000. Microsoft's newer history of Word instead gives October 25 as the release date for Word 1.0, so the surviving chronology is not perfectly consistent. What is clear is that Word was already on the market in 1983, before Microsoft announced Windows 1.0 in November of that year.
That choice of Xenix makes more sense once you set aside what happened to Microsoft afterward. Xenix was a serious part of Microsoft's business, and Microsoft would later describe it as the most popular Unix variant by 1984. IBM even selected both Xenix and MS-DOS for its PC AT that same year, which shows how plausible both paths still looked before Windows took over Microsoft's future.
Word was already preparing for a graphical future
The mouse showed up early to the party
The Xerox connection helps explain why early Word felt so unusual for its time. Simonyi had spent years around Xerox PARC's pioneering work on graphical computing, and at PARC he worked on software for the Alto, a machine with a bitmap display and a mouse years before either was standard PC gear. Bravo could show formatted text on screen in a form that closely matched the printed result, helping establish the WYSIWYG style of editing that is now taken for granted.
Microsoft carried a lot of that thinking into Word. The DOS version supported a mouse, style sheets, multiple windows, undo, footnotes, mail merge, and formatting that changed as you typed. Contemporary PC displays could only take that idea so far, though. Simonyi later explained that the IBM PC's character-based display could approximate the visual editing experience, while details such as proportional character widths still needed a proper graphical display.
That ambition also helps explain why Word's early years were a bit bumpy. PC users were already familiar with products such as WordStar and, increasingly, WordPerfect, while Microsoft's program behaved differently and introduced ideas that were not yet common on DOS PCs. The Computer History Museum describes Word for DOS as an also-ran compared with WordPerfect, which is a long way from the dominance Word would eventually achieve.
Windows eventually caught up with Word
The obvious pairing took a few years
Even after Microsoft announced Windows, customers could not actually buy it yet. Windows 1.0 finally shipped on November 20, 1985, two years after Word had already appeared on DOS, and Word itself was meanwhile moving onto another graphical platform.
Microsoft announced Macintosh software, including Word, alongside Apple's new Mac in January 1984, and the Mac version appeared commercially the following year. It was an early example in Microsoft's long history of building software for Apple, and the platform was a much more natural fit for the graphical editing ideas that Simonyi's team had been pursuing. In his Computer History Museum oral history, Simonyi described Microsoft as being
Source:MakeUseOf News