The History of Microsoft Word

Although I'd love to see more ink for Corel's Word Perfect or some other brand of word processor, Microsoft Office's Word has the lock (90%+) on the market of word processors.

Have you ever thought about the history of Microsoft Word? Maybe where it came from (IBM)? I haven't thought about it either, until now.

According to Microsoft, The first version of Word for Windows was released in 1989, a full two years before WordStar and WordPerfect were delivered on the new Windows operating system. That two-year head start, together with Word's decade of development and innovation ó as well as stellar product reviews ó helped catapult the program to the top slot in the early 1990s.

By 1994, Word was able to claim a 90 percent share of the word-processing market, making it one of the most successful and most well-known software products in history.

Microsoft's press release continues with it's interview of Peter Pathe, Microsoft Corporate Vice President. He has been the program's legal guardian throughout the Windows Era. Pathe joined Microsoft in 1991 to manage the development of the TrueType font system, still regarded as a de facto standard in digital typeface engineering. In 1993, he took over the helm of the Word Business Unit in Microsoft's Desktop Applications Division.

Read the full interview on Word's history, here.

1 comments

Comments

#1 posted by GratefulEd, March 26, 2009 5:10 PM

The truetype division was simply there to get the rendering technology into M$ software. TrueType was a spline based rendering language developed entirely by Apple Computer as a competitor to Postscript. Postscript dominated, and Apple all but abandoned TT for PS and uses display postscript to this day as the basis of its quartz video rendering engine. Ironic that later TT would actually be a bane to the business perhaps solely due to the fact that M$ embraced it as its OS standard.