![]() Microsoft founder and president Bill Gates was impressed. It may have been a “small program” but it had some sophisticated features, including support for style sheets, multiple windows, footnotes, mail-merge, undo, and the proportional fonts that the newly emerging laser printers would be able to use. It was a pretty small program, and I was familiar with word processing from my work at Xerox PARC with Charles.” 5 ![]() It was finished just over a year later, in October 1983. In the summer of 1982 Brodie began working with others at Microsoft on a word processor to be controlled by a mouse. The fact that Brodie had no college degree wasn’t an issue Brodie said later that “He asked me some programming questions and he liked the way I answered them.” 4 He hired Richard Brodie, a brilliant programmer he had first hired in 1979 at PARC. Simonyi was well-suited from his Xerox experience for the next assault on the competition: to unseat MicroPro’s popular WordStar word processor. The first, already in progress when he arrived, was the spreadsheet Multiplan, a VisiCalc competitor. In 1981 he left and joined Microsoft to lead a team in creating application programs. “I lost faith in Xerox’s ability to do anything” 3. Like much of the other innovative Alto software and hardware, BRAVO was never sold as a commercial product.Īfter nine years, Simonyi was frustrated by Xerox’s inability to turn great ideas into products. The screen showed what the final document would look like, and keyboard commands you used changed the look of the text, not a programming script. The emergence of WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) word processors changed all that. I just wanted to drop you a note to thank you…Īfter “compiling” and printing, you finally saw the result – which often wasn’t what you wanted. In the dark ages of computer word processing, what you wrote (and saw on the screen, if you had one) was cryptic formatting commands embedded within the text, like this. If you would like us to do more of this, please consider supporting the museum’s efforts by making a donation. Other historical source code releases in this series include IBM’s APL programming language, Apple II DOS, Adobe’s Photoshop, Apple Macpaint/QuickDraw, and Microsoft’s MSDOS. To access this material you must agree to the terms of the license displayed here, which permits only non-commercial use and does not give you the right to license it to third parties by posting copies elsewhere on the web.ĭownload Microsoft Word for Windows Version 1.1a Source Code Most of it is source code in C, but there are also text documents, x86 assembler-language source files, executable tools, batch files, and more. In the root directory there is a “readme” file that briefly explains the rest of the contents. The 7 MB zip file contains 1021 files in 33 folders. This material is © Copyright by Microsoft. With the permission of Microsoft Corporation, the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code of Word for Windows version 1.1a as it was on January 10, 1991. There’s only one way to understand the magic in detail: read the code. ![]() How did Word accomplish so much with so little? Remember, this was a time when a typical personal computer might have an 8 Mhz processor, 1 megabyte of memory, a 20 megabyte hard disk, and a floppy disk drive. But it was also a stunning technical achievement, and its ability to run on ordinary PCs created the first popular vanguard of the new graphics-oriented style of document preparation. Part of its success was due to Microsoft’s marketing acumen. These license terms are an agreement between Microsoft Clearly there was something extraordinary about Word for Windows. Many lock-free algorithms depend on atomic access to data which are a minimum of twice the size of a pointer.The market shares of various word processors in the 80's and 90's. In the other direction modern general purpose CPUs with 32-bit or 64-bit pointers have much wider data words than pointers (for example, 512-bit data words in the AVX subsystem of modern x86_64 CPUs). Still, microcontrollers with 8-bit data busses and larger address spaces (perhaps only for code and not data) are common. As a consequence you get additional weird limitations such as linked lists being able to hold more items than an array can. These are complicated to manage and cause proliferation of pointer-like types (near pointer, far pointer, based pointer). If your CPU can't do arithmetic on something the size of a pointer, your address has to be split across multiple variables, which results in a segmented or banked address space. Still, there are some relationships between pointer size and "word" size. ![]() They don't have to be the same, and the number of computer systems where they aren't vastly outnumbers the ones where they are. ![]()
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