1983

Microsoft Word

Charles Simonyi (b. 1948), Richard Brodie (b. 1959)

It would probably be a struggle to find a computer user who has not at some point encountered Microsoft Word. It is far from the only word processor in existence, and it wasn’t the first, but it nonetheless has triumphed as the world’s dominant word processing program for decades.

Word was developed by two former employees of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center—Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie—both of whom created what was the world’s first What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) word processor, Bravo. WYSIWYG means that the word processor runs on a graphical screen, showing proportionally spaced fonts, boldface, italics, and more.

Word 1.0 (originally named Multi-Tool Word) was released in October 1983 for MS-DOS and Xenix operating systems. But it wasn’t the first: competing programs included WordPerfect®, a text-mode word processor developed for the Data General minicomputer, and WordStar, a word processor created for 8-bit microcomputers, both developed in the late 1970s and ported to MS-DOS in 1982. All three programs ran in text mode; Word didn’t run in graphical mode on the PC until 1989, when Microsoft released Word for Windows.

Microsoft did all it could to push the adoption of Word, including bundling free copies of the program in the November 1983 issue of PCWorld magazine, the first time a disk was ever distributed by magazine.

The first WYSIWYG version of Microsoft Word was Word for the Apple Macintosh, which Microsoft shipped in 1985. The program was so popular—and so much better than Word on MS-DOS—that it helped fuel sales of the Macintosh.

Word benefitted as Microsoft’s operating systems grew in popularity—first MS-DOS, then Windows—and as tools in the Microsoft Office Suite expanded. Over time, the more people who used Word, the more difficult it became for their collaborators to use any other word processor—a prime example of what economists now call a network effect.

SEE ALSO “As We May Think” (1945), Mother of All Demos (1968), Xerox Alto (1973), IBM PC (1981), Microsoft and the Clones (1982), Desktop Publishing (1985)

Microsoft Word, part of the Microsoft Office suite, has become one of the world’s most iconic and popular word-processing programs.