
This, along with performance issues, made it a market dud. A lot of people felt Windows didn’t meet expectations and focused far too much on mouse input, particularly in an age where mouse use was not commonplace. Perhaps surprising to hear is that Microsoft Windows 1.0 was also a dud, drawing just as much criticism as MS Word 1.0 did. Apparently the Microsoft coders at the time weren’t quite that loopy. It didn’t delete the contents, but it did perform a zero seek on it. (And if you haven’t watched it, I highly recommend it) Pirating MS Word?: The Shadow Knows…
#Microsoft word for old mac os movie
Now trashing program disk,” a reference to the pulp-novel turned popular movie ‘The Shadow’. If one was found, it produced the message “The tree of evil bears bitter fruit. The earlier versions of word included copy protection that attempted to detect debuggers. If that’s the case, the four versions that followed of Word could be considered just that-the release of a very similar product with minor changes, the result of which was not very successful.Įven their programming was a little nutty. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

The Story of Word (And Microsoft): If It Doesn’t Work, Try, Try Again On another note, 1983 was also a time before people had developed efficient, easy-to-understand acronyms. Both of these programmers had worked on Xerox Bravo, the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processor. The product itself was developed by two former Xerox engineers, hired by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1981.
#Microsoft word for old mac os software
Even a campaign distributing free floppy disk demos with PC World Magazine didn’t flare up sales for Microsoft’s first software product. The crude mouse support it employed was a direct response to the Apple Mac. So Beautiful: Who wouldn’t pay $498 for this masterpiece?Īt the time, the market already had a number of popular word processors such as WordStar, Multimate, and WordPerfect. And it came out before the first Windows OS did-it was built for MS-Dos. You wouldn’t think it, given how much of a mainstay Microsoft Word is for the modern home and office computer, but the first version of Word was highly unsuccessful.

Microsoft Word 1.0: Groundbreaking, But Highly Unpopular Hitting the shelves on November 29, 1983, Microsoft Word 1.0 was the first word processing program to truly make use of the mouse. And if you think it’s expensive now, you should have seen how much it cost back then.

It’s almost exactly 33 years ago to the day since Microsoft released its very first software application, Microsoft Word 1.0.
