The Untold Story Of Microsoft Word - Early Days Explained
Have you heard of WYSIWYG?
No, my cat didn’t stroll over my keyboard, that’s an acronym.
WYSIWYG: “What You See Is What You Get”.
This was (and is) the design philosophy behind Microsoft Word, the word processor launched all the way back in 1983. As a writer you use Word, you love it or perhaps dislike it. However, learning its early story will certainly help you appreciate it more…
The Stone Age
Before the era of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processors, things were a bit different. Not only people were really bad at acronyms, but back then word processors were more like typewriters, only with some extra tricks. When you typed, you didn’t see exactly how your document would look when printed out. Instead, you’d type commands to format the text, then print out the page to see the change.
That’s not very intuitive, is it?
Word 1.0
The year was 1981. A man named Bill Gates, the CEO of a company called Microsoft – you might have heard of it – had a vision. He understood the future much better than the titans of the industry at the time, says Charles Simonyi, an important piece in the puzzle, who was later hired by Gates alongside Richard Brodie.[1] Two programmers who had previously worked on the very ambitious Xerox Bravo word processing program at Xerox PARC. Their new job at Microsoft was to develop a new word processor. Gates saw that graphical user interfaces would become the future and that man-machine interaction plays an important role in it.
Two years later, in 1983, Microsoft launched Word 1.0 in the glorious "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) mode for Xenix and MS-DOS (Microsoft had yet to release the first version of Windows). WinWorldpc.com states “Word for DOS was heavily promoted as ‘WYSIWYG’, although its limited on-screen formatting made that a bit of a joke.”[2]
The ambitious software featured (partial) WYSIWYG functionality, a progressive graphical user interface, and mouse support, which was not standard at the time. So how did it perform?
Ahead of The Curve
Despite great efforts, Word 1.0 was highly unpopular. For the very steep price of $498, or more than $1500 in today’s money adjusted for inflation, it could just not compete with other highly popular software at the time like WordStar and WordPerfect.
Out of desperation Microsoft even distributed free demo floppies with PCWorld magazine to no avail.
Word was slow and hardware intensive and focused too much on the mouse input, which all resulted in not-so-favorable reviews. Additionally, the user interface was rather unusual, compared to the leading word processors of the time. Even though Simonyi and his team tried, computers were just not powerful enough to run sophisticated graphical user interfaces. By today’s standards it might seem unusual – or even absurd – but even the peripherals were not ready for Word. For example, the computer screens and printers of the era did not yet know how to handle (or were not able to display) text-level formatting such as italics very well.[3]
It’s safe to say that Word was shooting way ahead.
But the following versions solved the unpopularity problem, right? Sadly, that wasn’t the case. Word 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 throughout the following years solved some minor issues but the software’s popularity stayed as low as ever. Was it time for Gates and Simonyi to give up?
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Breakout
While Word on DOS was nothing but an expensive experiment – on a positive note a great opportunity to gain experience – Gates did not plan to give up on his vision. They knew that the time of powerful computers would come, and the industry would eventually lean towards mouse input and graphical user interfaces. The time of patience and perseverance had come: waiting for an opportunity. Gates and Simonyi had realized what they had on their hands was not a fluke. It was something that needed to be kept in a bottle preserved – figuratively – for a time when the rest of the IT industry had time to catch up.
Of course, the opportunity did come eventually, first on Macintosh, and later on Windows. On the Macintosh – two years after its initial release on DOS – Word, which you had to pay for, was competing with a free (!) product: Apple’s own word processor that was bundled with the computer. But Word was so far ahead that people were willing to pay the extra money for it, just to get a better word processor.
Then Windows 3.0 was released. It was – surprisingly - a skunkworks project within Microsoft. With the experience gathered from previous projects, Word was once again brought to the drawing table and received major updates, then released on the new Windows 3.0. The version numbering for Word was restarted, the UI was revamped, and new features were implemented, marking a new era.
Word was a huge commercial success. It quickly became the de facto tool for many typists and writers, and the rise of home computers meant that it was no longer just a “business thing.” The world was finally ready this time…
Word’s decade of development and innovation — as well as stellar product reviews — helped catapult the program to the top slot in the early 1990s. By 1994, Word was able to claim a 90 percent share of the word-processing market, making it one of the most successful and best-known software products in history.[4]
The Present
Had it not been for Gates’ and Simonyi’s perseverance, the entire Word project could have been shut down decades ago. Their foresight and belief in themselves as well as the product they had created enabled MS Word to conquer the world.
Word is under constant development, forever adapting to or dictating trends in the realm of word processing. Today, Word is a platform enabling anyone to expand and supplement its core functions, so add-in tools like OnStyle get a chance to cater for professionals that use Word for specialized tasks.
New advancements like Copilot are bringing us a new era of word processing. The human-machine interaction is changing once again due to the rise of Artificial Intelligence. As AI technology is getting implemented in various software solutions we begin to communicate with software through dialogue, so called ‘prompts’. Instead of carrying out a number of tasks ourselves to achieve a goal, we describe the end result and watch the software create it (it still has a hard time with certain prompts).
However, the changing of MS Word is not without critique. A Word MVP (Most Valuable Professional) told DACHS: “Working the Word support forums at Microsoft Answers, I see the constant frustration of users encountering unexpected and unannounced changes in the way Word works, including such basic elements as keyboard shortcuts.”
?
No one knows what the future holds, so it’s best to keep updated.
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About the author
Szilárd Németh began his work at DACHS as an intern during his time at university and, since graduation, has transitioned to a full-time Sales and Marketing Specialist dedicating much of his time to OnStyle. He has been successfully building his expertise in marketing strategies, video content creation and in webinar creation and organization. In his spare time, Szilárd enjoys both hiking in the Bükk Mountains as well as reading fantasy books.