For most people, Microsoft Word and Windows belong together. The word processor is the default way millions of people create documents, and it has been packaged with the company's operating system in one form or another for decades. It would be easy to assume that Word was designed from the very beginning for Windows, or that Windows came first and Word followed naturally. The real history is far less obvious. Word was already a commercial product before Microsoft even announced Windows, and its earliest development did not take place on DOS or Windows at all.

Before Windows became the center of Microsoft's universe, the company was willing to build software for a wide range of platforms. In fact, Word's first steps were taken on Xenix, Microsoft's own version of Unix. That surprising origin says a great deal about the early identity of the company, the people who shaped its software, and the long road that eventually led to the familiar pairing of Word and Windows.

Key facts at a glance

• Microsoft Word was first developed on Xenix, Microsoft's Unix-based operating system, before Windows existed.
• Word for MS-DOS went on sale in late 1983, before Microsoft announced Windows 1.0 that November.
• Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie, both former Xerox PARC researchers, were the main creators of early Word.
• Windows 1.0 did not actually ship until November 20, 1985.
• Word for Windows did not arrive until 1989, but by 1993 it accounted for about half of word-processing market revenue.

Microsoft had a Unix phase before Windows

Microsoft announcing its own version of Unix sounds like a strange alternate-history detour, but Xenix was very real. The company introduced it in August 1980 as a portable Unix system for 16-bit processors. At the time, Microsoft was not yet the operating system giant it would become. It was a smaller company exploring several possible paths, and Unix looked like one of the more promising avenues. By 1982, Microsoft was already running several Xenix machines on its internal network. The company also collaborated with the Santa Cruz Operation to develop and support Xenix across different hardware platforms.

This is the Microsoft that Word came from. Charles Simonyi joined the company in 1981 after years at Xerox PARC, the legendary research center where many founding ideas of personal computing were developed. At Xerox PARC, Simonyi worked on Bravo, one of the earliest WYSIWYG text editors, built for the Xerox Alto. The Alto was a machine with a bitmap display and a mouse years before either was common on personal computers. He later brought in Richard Brodie, another former Xerox employee, and Brodie started work on Microsoft's new word processor in 1982.

The program initially went by the extremely 1980s corporate name Multi-Tool Word. Archival records and accountings from people involved indicate that Simonyi and Brodie developed it first for Xenix in February 1983, with a version for MS-DOS following later that year. Brodie himself has said that the first version was developed on Xenix, although that does not necessarily prove the Xenix build was the first to be sold commercially. Either way, Word's earliest development happened on Unix, not on Windows and not even strictly on MS-DOS.

Word was already on sale before Windows was announced

Microsoft gave the DOS release of Word an aggressive debut. The company's corporate timeline says that Word for MS-DOS 1.00 shipped on September 29, 1983, with a demo copy sent to personal computer magazine subscribers. Historical accounts put the number of demo disks distributed at roughly 450,000, which was an enormous number for that era. Microsoft's newer history of Word instead gives October 25 as the release date for Word 1.0, so the surviving chronology is not perfectly consistent. What is clear is that Word was already on the market in 1983, before Microsoft announced Windows 1.0 that November.

That timing matters because it overturns the familiar assumption that Windows came first and that Word was created for it. In truth, Windows did not ship until November 20, 1985, two years after Word had already appeared on DOS. Word was not just an early product; it was a product that existed before the operating system that would eventually make it ubiquitous. This is a reminder that Microsoft's path was not predetermined. The company was exploring multiple directions, and the future that eventually happened was only one of several plausible outcomes.

The choice of Xenix makes far more sense when you put aside everything that happened to Microsoft afterward. Xenix was a serious part of its business. Microsoft would later describe it as the most popular Unix variant by 1984. IBM even selected both Xenix and MS-DOS for its PC AT that same year, which shows how plausible both paths still looked before Windows took over Microsoft's future. For a brief period, the company was genuinely willing to spread its bets across platforms, a stance that later became almost unthinkable.

Word was already preparing for a graphical future

The Xerox connection helps explain why early Word felt so unusual for its time. Simonyi had spent years around Xerox PARC's pioneering work on graphical computing. At PARC, he worked on software for the Alto, a machine that had a bitmap display and a mouse long before either was standard PC equipment. Bravo could show formatted text on screen in a form that closely matched the printed result, helping establish the WYSIWYG style of editing that people now take for granted.

Microsoft carried a great deal of that thinking into Word. The DOS version supported a mouse, style sheets, multiple windows, undo, footnotes, mail merge, and formatting that changed as you typed. Contemporary PC displays could only take that idea so far, though. Simonyi later explained that the IBM PC's character-based display could approximate the visual editing experience, while details such as proportional character widths still needed a proper graphical display. In other words, Word was designed with a graphical future in mind, even when the hardware of the time could not fully deliver the experience its creators envisioned.

That ambition also helps explain why Word's early years were a bit bumpy. PC users were already familiar with products such as WordStar and, increasingly, WordPerfect. Microsoft's program behaved differently and introduced ideas that were not yet common on DOS PCs. Historical accounts describe Word for DOS as an also-ran compared with WordPerfect, which is a long way from the dominance Word would eventually achieve. Being ahead of one's time does not always mean immediate success, and early Word provides a compelling example of that pattern.

Windows eventually caught up with Word

Even after Microsoft announced Windows, customers could not actually buy it yet. Windows 1.0 finally shipped on November 20, 1985, two years after Word had already appeared on DOS. Word itself was meanwhile moving onto another graphical platform. Microsoft announced Macintosh software, including Word, alongside Apple's new Mac in January 1984, and the Mac version appeared commercially the following year. It was an early example in Microsoft's long history of building software for Apple, and the platform was a much more natural fit for the graphical editing ideas that Simonyi's team had been pursuing. In later oral history reflections, Simonyi described Microsoft as being especially well positioned for the Mac because its applications group already understood graphical interfaces.

Word for Windows did not arrive until 1989, six years after the original DOS release. The timing worked in its favor. Windows 3.0 followed in 1990 as an important step in Windows' evolution from its 1.0 beginnings, giving Word a much stronger graphical PC platform on which to showcase the interface Microsoft had been working toward for years. The long wait was not wasted. By the time Windows 3.0 was available, Word's design philosophy could finally be expressed on the PC in the way its creators had originally intended.

Its fortunes changed quickly from there. According to historical market analyses, Word for Windows was generating roughly half of word-processing market revenue by 1993, a remarkable turnaround for a product whose DOS ancestor had struggled against WordPerfect. By then, the Word-and-Windows association that is now taken for granted was finally taking shape.

Word's strange beginning explains a lot

What stands out most is how clearly Word's early history captures a completely different Microsoft, one that sold Unix, hired Xerox PARC veterans, and was happy to build major software for whichever platforms seemed worth betting on. Word passed through Xenix, DOS, and the Mac before Windows became the platform that turned it into a giant. Looking back now, the Word-and-Windows pairing feels almost preordained, yet Word spent its first several years navigating a much wider software landscape while Microsoft was still figuring out which direction would define its future.

Source:MakeUseOf News