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.