For decades, Microsoft Word and Windows have felt like two halves of the same idea. The word processor has been the default way millions of people write, and Windows has been the default way millions of people use a PC. It would be easy to assume Word grew up alongside Windows as part of one carefully planned story. The real timeline is far less direct. Word was already being sold as a commercial product before Microsoft even announced Windows, and the very first version was not built for DOS.

Word's earliest known development happened on Xenix, Microsoft's own Unix-like operating system. That fact places the product in a version of Microsoft that is now almost unrecognizable. Long before Windows became the center of the company's universe, Microsoft was comfortable building software for a variety of platforms and following what looked like the next important direction in computing. Word is one of the clearest surviving reminders of that adventurous period.

Microsoft had a Unix phase before Windows

To understand why Word started on Unix, it helps to remember how different Microsoft was in the early 1980s. The company had already made a name for itself with programming languages and BASIC interpreters, but it did not yet own the PC software market. When it decided to pursue Unix, it did so in a serious way.

Microsoft announced Xenix in August 1980. The system was a portable version of Unix intended for 16-bit processors, and the company positioned it as a way to run Unix across many different machines. This was not a small side experiment. By 1982 Microsoft was using several Xenix systems on its own internal network. It also partnered with the Santa Cruz Operation to develop and support Xenix across various hardware platforms.

Xenix later became a major part of Microsoft's business. The company said the system was the most popular Unix variant by 1984. That same year, IBM selected both Xenix and MS-DOS for its PC AT, showing just how plausible a Unix-led future looked before Windows took over. A young Microsoft was willing to support multiple directions at once.

Yes, that Microsoft

The idea of Microsoft selling Unix sounds strange only in hindsight. At the time, the company was much more open to experimentation. Word emerged from that culture. Charles Simonyi joined Microsoft in 1981 after spending years at Xerox PARC, where he worked on Bravo, an early editor for the Xerox Alto. Richard Brodie, another former Xerox employee, joined soon after and started work on Microsoft's word processor in 1982.

The program was initially called Multi-Tool Word, a name that fits the corporate language of the early 1980s. According to the UK National Archives' PRONOM database, Simonyi and Brodie developed the first version for Xenix in February 1983. A version for MS-DOS followed later in the same year. Brodie himself has said the first version was developed on Xenix, although that does not necessarily prove the Xenix build was the first to be sold commercially. Either way, the evidence points to Unix as the original environment for Word.

Word was already preparing for a graphical future

The choice of Xenix makes sense when considered alongside the people building Word. Simonyi had spent years at Xerox PARC, a lab known for groundbreaking work in graphical computing. At PARC, he worked on software for the Xerox Alto, a machine with a bitmap display and a mouse at a time when neither was common. Bravo could display formatted text on screen in a way that closely matched the final printed page.

That kind of WYSIWYG editing, which stands for what you see is what you get, is now taken for granted. At the time, it was a radical departure from character-based word processors. Microsoft carried much of that thinking into Word. The DOS version of Word came with support for a mouse, style sheets, multiple windows, undo, footnotes, mail merge, and formatting that updated as the user typed. Those features seem ordinary now, but they were part of a much larger graphical vision in the early 1980s.

The hardware of the period could only take that vision so far. Simonyi later explained that the IBM PC's character-based display could approximate the visual editing experience, but proportional character widths and other typographic details needed a proper graphical display. Word was therefore designed with a future in mind, even when that future had not quite arrived.

The road was not smooth

Word's early years were difficult. DOS users were already familiar with other programs, especially WordStar and WordPerfect, and Word did not behave like them. Its graphical ideas, mouse support, and live formatting were unfamiliar to many people who had learned to work with character-based tools. The Computer History Museum describes Word for DOS as an also-ran compared with WordPerfect. That is a long way from the dominance Word eventually achieved.

The gap between Word's early ambition and its market performance is important. Word was not an overnight success. It spent years as one of several competing word processors, and it was not even the best-selling choice for DOS. The product survived because Microsoft believed in the graphical direction it represented.

Windows eventually caught up with Word

Microsoft announced Windows in November 1983, but customers could not buy it right away. Windows 1.0 did not ship until November 20, 1985, two years after Word had already appeared on DOS. During those years, Word was moving onto other graphical platforms.

Microsoft announced Macintosh software, including Word, alongside Apple's new Mac in January 1984. The Mac version of Word appeared commercially in 1985. It was an early example of Microsoft building serious software for Apple, and the Mac was a much more natural fit for the graphical editing style Simonyi's team had been pursuing. In his Computer History Museum oral history, Simonyi described Microsoft as being especially well positioned for the Mac because its applications group already understood graphical interfaces.

The obvious pairing took time

Word for Windows did not arrive until 1989, six years after the original DOS release. The timing worked in Microsoft's favor. Windows 3.0 followed in 1990 and was a major step forward from the early Windows versions. It gave Word a strong graphical platform and helped the interface that Simonyi had been pushing toward for years finally reach a wide audience.

Word's fortunes changed quickly

Source: MakeUseOf News