Happy Birthay, Microsoft Word

After the 20th anniversary of my blog yesterday, today marks another significant computing anniversary. Forty years ago, Microsoft released Microsoft Word 1.0. The program got off to a slow start, but eventually became the dominant word processor.

I first encountered Word in 1985, when I picked up a copy of PC World (if memory serves) that had a bonus copy of Word 2.0. At the time, I was using WordStar 2000, but I immediately abandoned that for Word and never looked back. (I still consider Word 5.5 for DOS to be the best version of Word, including all the subsequent releases of Word for Windows). 

The BBC has published a long retrospective that looks at "the role the software has played in four decades of language and communication evolution."

Ironically, given its ubiquity, Word has rarely been a pioneer when it comes to features. As mentioned, it was far from the first word processor. It’s often credited with introducing grammar tools, despite the fact these were developed decades earlier. And the idea behind "track changes" – where you can see edits to a document – wasn’t a Microsoft invention.

Yet Word’s superpower was using smart, simple design choices to make such features accessible to a global audience, not just techies. Its "What You See is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) design philosophy is now commonplace in software and on the internet. Word introduced line breaks, along with bold and italic fonts on screen. It revolutionised typeset-quality printing, as well as the use of templates. And it was in these templates that Word’s early impact on communication emerged.

As for me, I still use Word for Microsoft 365 for most word-processing tasks. While at the Toronto Stock Exchange, I had to use Google Docs, which I hated with a burning passion. Google Docs has since improved to the point where it is usable for small tasks, but I haven't yet found a reason to use it instead of Word. (I do use Google Sheets for simple spreadsheets; it compares more favourably to Excel than Docs does to Word). I've played around with Libre Office and would probably use that if I couldn't afford a Microsoft 365 subscription.

See the Microsoft Word topic on this blog for many posts about Word, including guides that I wrote to help co-workers at the TSX.