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. The emergence of WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) word processors changed all that. I just wanted to drop you a note to thank you…Īfter “compiling” and printing, you finally saw the result – which often wasn’t what you wanted. 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.

If you would like us to do more of this, please consider supporting the museum’s efforts by making a donation. 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. 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.ĭownload Microsoft Word for Windows Version 1.1a Source Code 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. In the root directory there is a “readme” file that briefly explains the rest of the contents. The 7 MB zip file contains 1021 files in 33 folders.

This material is © Copyright by Microsoft. 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. There’s only one way to understand the magic in detail: read the code. How did Word accomplish so much with so little? 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. 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.

Part of its success was due to Microsoft’s marketing acumen. These license terms are an agreement between Microsoft Clearly there was something extraordinary about Word for Windows. The market shares of various word processors in the 80's and 90's.

Ms word