Clearly there was something extraordinary about Word for Windows. Part of its success was due to Microsoft’s marketing acumen. 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.
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. How did Word accomplish so much with so little?
There’s only one way to understand the magic in detail: read the code. 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.
Quite amazing that we’re getting access to the source code for pivotal software like this.
I was a hardcore Wordstar-on-DOS user from the mid to late 80s, and I held on until I bought a Mac in 1992 and started using MS Word for Mac. Like many Word-on-Mac users, I skipped the version 6 “upgrade” and stuck with Word 5.1 for a long time until Microsoft got their act together.
This was released nearly 2 years ago? What is your point? It just seems a bit odd… especially with your wording as if we are only just now getting access to something that has been out in the wild for years…
He not said “Quite amazing that we’re now getting access to the source code for pivotal software like this.”
And the difference of 2 years is irrelevant for a software released in 1991 as of 2016.
I stumbled across this on Twitter, and don’t think we’ve had it on OSNews until now, so I figured it’d still be fun to post.</p>
Thank you for posting it, Thom.
Regardless of how long ago it happened,
I wasn’t aware of it, and now I am. Right
on the tails of playing around with some
old 16-bit hardware, too.
On an 8088 running Windows 2.03 with 640Kb of addressable RAM. It officially wanted Windows 2.11, but 2.03 used less memory and it appeared to work. When running, there was <100Kb of free memory. This code release showed how it worked, with a C-to-PCode compiler that allowed demand paging of PCode segments on a system that wouldn’t natively support it. And that was forward thinking, because by keeping the code in a C-like language this scaffolding could be thrown away later on.
That said, the memory limitations of the time meant that documents also needed to be modified through temp files on disk without loading them completely into memory. That made sense at the time, but it’s frustrating that Word still carries forward a lot of this logic.
Note that this code is not using a open source license,
It is limited to non-commercial use…
Don’t tell me you were about to recompile this and sell it ?
Open source actually has a legal meaning. Calling this open source would not be correct.
One part of the definition of open source software is that you are allowed to change it. You are not in this case.
nobody claimed that its source code is “open-source”???
Seems you are right, don’t know what the first person in the thread was going on about.
I don’t think there is any sort of legal definition. The wikipedia article on this sums up the situation pretty well, “Although the OSI definition of ‘open source software’ is widely accepted, a small number of people and organizations use the term to refer to software where the source is available for viewing, but which may not legally be modified or redistributed.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Open-source_versu…
Don’t get me wrong, considering what they had to work with, Word 1.1 was a fairly impressive achievement, but it was hardly groundbreaking compared to WYSIWYG word processors on other platforms. Even Word for the original Macintosh could be considered a larger achievement: releasing in 1985 (about five years before Word 1.1 for Windows), it provided a full WYSIWYG word processor in just 128k of RAM, running from a 400k floppy. GeoWrite on the C64 was an impressively capable WYSIWYG word processor running on a system with 64k RAM, 1MHz 8-bit CPU, and 170k floppy. Amiga and Atari ST also had decent WYSIWYG word processors, also using fewer resources than Word for Windows used (and on more affordable machines). Historically significant (which this is) is not the same as extraordinary.
I was going to ask if anyone has compiled it for the Atari ST. Aparrently MS had released Microsoft Write which was basically Word 1.0 for it, so this would be an upgrade. Pretty sure Atari Works is nicer though.
There was one great thing that Word had and is usually overlooked. I don’t remember whether it was version 1.1 or 2 but there was a very good tutorial included. It would be comparable to youtube tutorials of today. It showed you what it could do, how to do it with moving cursor, menus and all, and would then let you exercise. They dropped it in later versions which was a shame. At least I could never find it again.
This one:
https://youtu.be/BwH_TMqjixc?t=15s
Word’s success was NOT based on the quality of the program or marketing. Unless you include racketeering being under the marketing department.
Microsoft would go into brick and mortar stores and tell them that if they stocked or sold WordPerfect/WordPerfect Office then Microsoft would charge them more for DOS/Windows.
Not only that, if a company _did_ go along with MS wanted, then Microsoft gave that company marketing money so this company could put out more and bigger ads which got more attention.
So any company that didn’t go along with what MS wanted not only had to pay for more DOS and/or Windows but also Word/Office but they also didn’t get money from MS for marketing.
So yes, I guess racketeering is under marketing and was absolutely illegal but MS got away with it. But why?
Well probably the same way that Bill Gates didn’t go to jail when he was caught hacking into his school’s mainframe while in highschool. His parents paid the school money, in the guise of a donation for this or that, and the high school dropped the charges on Bill Gates.
Yes, money talks. And since Bill Gate’s dad was a partner in a law firm that represented corporations (and smaller companies and certain wealthy people) they were very used to “handing” problems.
It’s all documented if someone feels like digging up the details. But that’s how Word and Office won the day and progress for better software has been harmed ever since.
PS: This also relates to the OS wars. Same tactics won that for MS also.
Exactly. Now they talk about the historic achievement of implementing what the competition had already done before.
I wonder where all the revisionism regarding Microsoft comes from. Because of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation?
History gets written by the victors. I don’t think the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation has anything to do with this phenomenon, it’s more something ingrained into society.
In other words, owning to microsoft’s market position later on, we amplify their historic roles above what they would have been had they not become a dominant force. Microsoft technology was really not considered unique or innovative at the time, heck MSDOS was just a clone, and bill gates & microsoft didn’t even develop it at that. So it while it may be biased and unfair, MSDOS and MS software are historically more significant than the others simply because it’s microsoft and microsoft won. Hypothetically if MS lost, osnews probably wouldn’t even bother posting an article about it because it would be too esoteric (*).
* If this is untrue, and osnews would consider publishing news about esoteric technology that is of no use to anybody and never went anywhere, then perhaps I could scrounge up a couple things from unknown & defunct companies
BeOS, to name one ?
Kochise,
I was thinking more along the lines of products that, when named, nobody would recognize at all unless they worked there.
ISM Communicator anyone? We were working on telephony products in an industrial context to allow engineers to interact with control systems 24/7 via telephone. It all went bust in the dotcom era.
I’d find it very interesting to hear everyone’s backstory. It’s just weird that we all know so much about the lives of celebrities, and yet so little about each other.
Bingo.
They also destroyed wordperfect which was much better by promoting a GUI library that was yanked just barely before release… costing the wordperfect developers a year or two of development, and forcing another year delay with over-rushed panic redevelopment.
There’s a whole bunch of other historical stuff that would be interesting to release, either in binary or eventually source form…
Things like some of the first 64bit internal development versions of win2k that ran on the alpha etc..
I would like to see the last of all the ‘retro’ operating systems get posted on github. Namely TOS and AmigaOS.