The Computer History Museum made the Word 1.1a source code publicly available in 2014, now it has been ported to 64-bit Windows.
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This release of Word marked a milestone in the word processing market, as it pioneered genuinely useful feature additions like WYSIWYG editing, graphics, and table insertion on Windows. It would spearhead the momentum in shifting users from DOS productivity monsters like WordPerfect to complete dominance in Windows-land. Word for Windows 1.1a added all its frills while remaining very efficient, running on systems with CPUs that ran in single-figure MHz speeds, and with as little as 1MB of RAM .
Another notable feature of this version of Word for Windows is that Microsoft permitted its source code to be released in full. You can still grab that code via the Computer History Museum (CHM). There you will find a 7MB bundle of C source, x86 assembly, build tools, and documentation. These 1,021 files in 33 folders are what JMarshall23 started with.
GitHub doesn’t have Windows x64 binaries ready for the casually curious on the lookout for a free, lightweight word processor to download and use. Instead, you’ll need access to Visual Studio 2022 with Desktop development with C++, a Windows 10 or Windows 11 SDK installed through Visual Studio, CMake 3.25 or newer, and PowerShell, notes Marshall. Then simply follow the GitHub instructions to build and run Word1.
It will be interesting to see if more comes from this x64 port, but Microsoft’s Word for Windows 1.1a code release carries a license that “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,” says the CHM.
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/microsoft-office/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/microsoft-office/x64-port-of-microsoft-word-for-windows-1-1a-arrives-you-can-now-run-this-seminal-1990-word-processor-natively-in-windows-11#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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