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                 Microsoft Word Celebrates Its 40th Anniversary

   Adam Engst

   Love it or hate it, Microsoft Word is one of the most important Mac
   apps of all time. [1]Called Multi-Tool Word when it [2]debuted for
   MS-DOS in 1983, the name was soon changed to Microsoft Word, and a
   [3]free demonstration version was included on a disk with the November
   1983 edition of PC World. Later that year, Microsoft showed Word
   running on Windows and [4]ported it to the Mac in 1985. The rest, as
   they say, is history, and Microsoft Word is now celebrating its [5]40th
   anniversary. Microsoft has created a timeline showing some of its
   technical milestones.

   Tonya and I have a long history with Word. Although we primarily used
   [6]WriteNow at Cornell University during our undergraduate years from
   1985 through 1989, we often helped users with Word while working in
   Cornell University's public computer rooms. Two years after we
   graduated, a college friend of Tonya's encouraged her to apply for a
   job at Microsoft. She was hired and spent the next two years doing
   phone and online support for Word 4 and Word 5. (So many people
   considered Word 5 to be the pinnacle of the app's history that Tonya
   later penned two April Fools' spoof articles about it: '[7]Microsoft
   Word 5.1 for Mac OS X,' 1 April 2003, and '[8]Microsoft Word 5.1
   Returns... to the iPad,' 1 April 2011.) She also helped edit the manual
   for Word 6, Microsoft's first attempt at a cross-platform version. I
   applied for a position as a Word program manager and got an interview
   but was not offered the job due to my lack of design skills, a
   rejection I took as a compliment, given my low opinion of Word's
   interface.

   After leaving Microsoft in 1994, Tonya wrote [9]The Word Book for
   Macintosh Users and the [10]Word 6 Starter Kit, among other books that
   touched on Word. In 2003, when we came up with Take Control Books, one
   of our key innovations was to have authors and editors work in the
   final layout of the manuscript. Tonya leveraged many Word features to
   facilitate this approach, including an automatic table of contents,
   hyperlinks, canned blank tip boxes, and shared keyboard shortcuts for
   applying approved styles. At that time, Word was the only Mac word
   processor that could handle book-length documents with change tracking,
   and the Windows version of Word could export PDFs with links. We
   eventually moved first to Pages (for EPUB export) and then to Nisus
   Writer Pro (for faster and better production), but Take Control
   wouldn't have happened without Word.

   Although I've always preferred other word processors to Word, Tonya's
   deep understanding of how Word thinks has kept her using it the entire
   time. Even now, in her work at Cornell, she spends most of her days
   editing documents in Word.

References

   Visible links
   1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word
   2. https://books.google.com/books?id=4S8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA10#v=onepage&q&f=false
   3. https://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/25/business/technologyandrew-pollack-computerizing-magazines.html
   4. https://lowendmac.com/2013/microsoft-word-for-mac-faq/
   5. https://insider.microsoft365.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-word-turns-40
   6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow
   7. https://tidbits.com/2003/04/01/microsoft-word-5-1-for-mac-os-x/
   8. https://tidbits.com/2011/04/01/microsoft-word-5-1-returns-to-the-ipad/
   9. https://archive.org/details/wordbookformacin0000engs
  10. https://www.amazon.com/Word-Starter-Kit-Book-Disk/dp/1568300352

   Hidden links:
  11. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2023/10/Word-40th-Timeline.png

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