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Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Technology
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Celebrations aside, it's worth pointing out the productivity juggernaut of 2023 was not always the bloated behemoth that is found on so many workstations.Coded by a team that included such luminaries-to-be as Charles Simonyi – who had previously worked at Xerox PARC and would later go on to success in Microsoft's application division – it is fair to say that Word was not quite an overnight success.
WordPerfect also presented a threat, having debuted on DOS the previous year.
The first version of Word was not exactly a WYSIWYG application, but Microsoft soldiered on and added features incrementally over the years until the final iteration – Word 6.0 for DOS in 1993.
Just as Word once challenged the dominance of its rivals, it has seen its market share eroded in recent years by competitors like Google Docs.
The source code for Word 1.1a, first released in 1984, can be found at the Computer History Museum.
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