Today, Microsoft Word is one of the most important tools in every workplace – you've probably heard of it. But 41 years ago, a program like Microsoft Word was unheard of until Microsoft released Word 1.0 on September 29, 1983, which eventually took the world by storm and dominated every office space in the United States in the late '80s and early '90s. Of course, Microsoft didn't stop there, but has continued to update and optimize the software ever since. It was head and shoulders above all competitors and after being bundled with the first version of the Windows operating system, it became a staple in both the office and home.
Word was started under DOS
In September 1983, Microsoft had not yet released the first version of Windows, so Word was initially not available there. The original version of Microsoft Word was designed for DOS-based PCs, specifically Microsoft's own MS-DOS and Xenix, a Unix-based operating system that the company had also developed several years earlier. Eventually, “Word 1.0” came to Macintosh and Windows, but these three versions of the software were completely different.
Word 1.0 for DOS was quite innovative in that it was one of the first word processing programs at the time to make full use of a computer mouse, which came at an opportune time as Microsoft had also released its first mouse at the time. Of course, in some cases the mouse offered a more intuitive input option. Word also supported both text and graphic modes, with a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) interface that attempted to accurately reflect the end result of a typed document, supporting things like italicized, bolded, and underlined text.
Although Word 1.0 for DOS was innovative for the time, it was not well received in the market because there was already other competition from companies such as WordPerfect and WordStar with their own word processing programs.
It took years for Word to come to Windows
Later in 1983, Microsoft announced the first version of Windows, which was released in 1985. However, Word was not released for Windows until 1989. It took quite a while for Microsoft to use it in its own operating system, although at the time Windows itself wasn't that popular either. Things started to change when Windows 3.0 came out and shortly after received a new version of Word.
From that point on, Microsoft released versions of Word for Windows, DOS and Mac until the DOS version was discontinued entirely in 1993. Of course, there are still versions for Mac and Windows today.
Word was integrated into the Microsoft Office package in 1990 alongside Excel and PowerPoint. This meant that, in addition to word processing, users also had spreadsheet and presentation programs available. To date, these products (and others) are sold together as part of the Office suite or Microsoft 365 subscription.
Even without Windows, Microsoft Word was a powerhouse
Since its humble beginnings, Microsoft Word has grown into one of the most popular office tools in the world, and pretty much everyone is familiar with it in one way or another. Word has expanded to mobile platforms and even the web, with these versions offering slightly more limited features for free. This most likely happened in response to many Microsoft Office users using Google Workspace online instead.
Microsoft Word now supports much more than just text editing. In addition to all sorts of complex formatting options, Word lets you add images, shapes, videos, and even 3D objects to documents. Of course, many of these cannot be printed, but the nature of documents in general is now much more digitally focused. So these types of features can be useful when creating documents to be shared and viewed on a laptop or desktop computer rather than on print media. However, Word still includes all the tools you need to properly format documents for printing.
It will be interesting to see what the future holds for this software as it has passed the 40-year mark and is marching into the next decade with great success.