Why MS Word jumped from version 2 to version 6

[liam_on_linux]

There were three products all called MS Word, only peripherally related:

 

Word for DOS, which I first saw at version 3, and of which I used 3, 4, 5, 5.5 (when it suddenly switched to CUA menus), and 6 (like WordPerfect, the last and best version).

 

Word for Mac, which I first saw at version 4, and which in generally-held opinion peaked at v5.1.

 

Word for Windows, AKA WinWord, which went v1, v2, v6.

 

But there were legit reasons. 

 

MS was making an effort to harmonise and coordinate its versions. 

 

IIRC the story is that Gates met Paul Brainerd (founder of Aldus) at some event, and Brainerd told him that Aldus (creators of PageMaker, the ultimate DTP app in its day and the product that made the Mac a big success) was working on a wordprocessor for Windows, because there wasn't a good one. The product was codenamed "Flintstone" and was nearly ready for alpha test.

 

Gates panicked, lied to Brainerd that they shouldn't waste their time because MS was almost ready to launch its and it'd be a killer app. 

 

Brainerd went back to base and cancelled Flintstone. Gates went back to base and told his team to write a Windows word-processor ASAP because Aldus was about to kill them.

 

So, WinWord 1 was a rush job and was rather sketchy. 

 

WinWord 2 fixed a lot of issues and had a much better layout of menus, dialogs, toolbars etc.

 

Then MS decided to put out an Office suite and make the version numbers match across platforms. 

 

So, the native Mac Word was killed.

 

The Windows codebase was ported to the Mac, and got the next consecutive version number. Mac users hated it at first: it was much bigger, much slower and buggier, and felt Windows-like rather than Mac-like.

 

The Windows version was bumped to match the Mac one, which is sort of fair: there was a common codebase, and the Mac version couldn't jump backwards to v3.

 

The DOS version got a minor rejig to reorganize its menus and dialogs to have the same layout as the new v6 product, and the version number was bumped.

 

Word 6 for Windows is the classic version, IMHO. It looks much like all the later versions, works like them, etc.

 

The snags with it in the 21st century are twofold:

 

[1] The 16-bit version works fine in emulators and things but only does short 8.3 filenames, which is a PITA today.

 

[2] The very rare 32-bit version for NT is out there, and handles long filenames fine, but it's a port of a Windows 3 app. So, no proportional scrollbar thumbs, so you can't see how big the document is, something I use a lot. And no mouse scroll-wheel support, because they hadn't been invented yet, but makes it feel very broken on a modern OS.

 

Otherwise, I would use it now, TBH. It's tiny and fast and has 100× the functions I need.

 

Word 95 fixes all that, but the snag with Word 95 is that it uses the old DOS version file format. Modern apps don't support the file format.

 

Word 97 uses a new file format, which remained the same until 2003. Office 2007 introduced new Zip-compressed XML files, and the Ribbon, and broke everything.

 

But it's a lot easier to load Word 97 .DOC files into any other modern app than Word 95 ones, or else I'd still use Word 95.

 

But yes, Word 6 harmonized the UI, the file format, and the version number across Win, Mac and DOS. And it *did* come after Word 5.5 for DOS and Word 5.1 for Mac.

 

 

DOS Word 5.5 is freeware now, but the differences from the Word 6 UI are annoying.

 

Word 6 for DOS fixes that and is a nice app to use, but it's not free. I wish MS made it freeware too, but I think the company knows that for a lot of professional writers, Word 6 for DOS is adequate to the task and it might actually hurt sales of Office.

 

OTOH Corel could free WordPerfect 6 for DOS and it might actually _help_ sales of the Windows version. It also should re-enter the Mac market, IMHO. But it's too late now.

 

Comments

[matrixmann]

Hm... It's interesting reading a little bit of history on these early developments in Windows and the software used on it. My eyes still got to see Win 3.11, but due to that being more than half a life ago, my brain doesn't remember much in more complex contexts.
And it's rather today that I have some sort of knowledge how to deal with this old stuff, if I had to use it again.

For many years, I would continue to use Word 6.0 (I don't know where in those threads of software development that would have to be inserted...?), for as long as it could be, as it was pretty basic for writing and without a lot of frills. And, I guess, I only jumped to Word97/2000/2003 because Open Office Writer's export filter to the file format (of the then pre-installed version on my new PC)worked correctly.

[liam_on_linux]

It's odd to me, but I hear comments like that a lot: "it was 25 years ago, and I don't really remember now."

I couldn't tell you who was in the charts then, or what books came out, but I remember a lot of the tech stuff, because knowing all that was my job.

WinWord 6, I guess? Yup. A classic version. Never needed a fixpack or update; neither did Word 7, i.e. Word 95.

But the doc format, as you say, was the killer. There are ways around it, but life's too short.

[matrixmann]

For the technical inexperience that I had back then, in combination with age and how long ago that is already now, I feel like my brain still remembers quite a chunk. Only, today I'd know way better how to navigate with such old software and I'd be inclined to look at certain things that didn't seem interesting back in the day.

Word 6.0 is a bit of indefineable to me... On one hand, you had the character limitation for file names just like under a conventional Dos-system, but on the other... I think, trying to use something like Dos-box on it failed because it says you need MS Windows to run it. So it wasn't a Dos application. (Probably 16-bit because, I think, as changing to Win7, it couldn't be run on that OS either, and I think the error message it gave you was the hint that this is neither a 32-bit, nor a 64-bit application and therefore cannot be run.)

As you mention that... Yes, I think this application was finalized, there was no Service Pack for it or versions around updated with a Service Pack.

Fun trivia thing besides - in WinME, you could let Wordpad natively save as Word 6.0 data format. No idea why they integrated it there... If it was technically not that difficult?

As far as I know from critics and own usage, the peak in office functionality seemingly was reached by Microsoft with their office applications around the Millennium. Those are far lesser complained about than later versions (e. g. in design and how something particular works) - and the licensing aspect with them was still the old-school way ( = installing software on a PC and then you were done; no online copy-protection that limited you in how many PCs you could equip with it; no annual paid subscriptions necessary).
On top of it - compatibility from Word 97 up to Word 2003. It didn't matter which version of these you used to write a document. They all could read them.

[liam_on_linux]

Ahh... yes, I do not know your age, so I can't comment on that. I was already in my 20s when I started working with Word 3 or so.

You seem to be confused over Word 6 and Windows 3 apps.

Word 6 was 4 different products. There was a DOS App called Word 6, a Windows 3 app called Word 6, a Windows NT app called Word 6, and a classic MacOS app called Word 6.

The Windows 3 app was 16-bit, because Windows 3 was 16-bit.

The Windows NT app was 32-bit, because Windows NT was 32-bit.

The DOS and Windows 3 versions could only handle short filenames: 8 letter names, 3 letter extension. That is all Windows 3 could handle.

But it sounds like you tried to run Win3 16-bit WinWord under DOSBox. That won't work. Windows apps need Windows to run.

If you had tried the DOS Word 6, it would run fine.

[matrixmann]

According to the information you provide here about it, I see why it couldn't work and I can make my estimation what version of Word 6 I only had. It must have been the Windows 3 application - 'cause, starting with that one, it was Windows 3.11 as an OS. This version of Word 6 worked on that OS.

When I started having to do with it, it was already horribly outdated. At the beginning of the noughties, working with Win 3.11 at the beginning of my body's teens (CPU at 100 Mhz, no CD-drive, RAM - I have no idea...) - that definitely was outdated at that time.
Since a realistic interest in computers was on none in my surroundings back then, I had no-one to learn anything from or ask anything. So I didn't really what I was dealing with, and also I wasn't smart enough to consciously play with its conditions.

[liam_on_linux]

Yeah, no problem at all. :-) I did not mean to make fun of you or anything and I hope it didn't come across as such.

Yes, it was hard to investigate this stuff before the WWW, although there were online resources before the Web.

FWIW, Word 6 only came out in 1993 so by the sound of it, it wasn't as outdated as you suspect.

[matrixmann]

If for the Windows branch before the internet and most oft the 90s, I'm completely blank and know just the few bits that I acquire through reading about anything. - It's just that the conditions didn't match so that I'd get confronted with it.

If to say so, as I've learned later, my mind rather has some bit of knowledge about the Commodore Amiga branch of the early 90s. - Not really in technical things, but I get to realize what kind of stuff my eyes have seen as a kid. For example: Today I know what most of the games that I played back then were plain pirate copies. Recognizable through the cracktros that I know them with. (Partly it's hard to find a specific one of a certain group that you know on YouTube, I've noticed.)

Although that part of the history in the early years of computers moving in to simple peoples' homes isn't uninteresting too...

[muninnhuginn]

I still have (fond?) memories of the Esc, T, S kepresses to save in Word 5. Never liked 5.5 in comparison. But I agree, 6 was good. Did some pretty big manuals in 6. And a lot of Help files.

[liam_on_linux]

Yes, me too. It was an easy and quite efficient interface, IMHO. Worked for me.

5.5 was clunky, but it works and it's free. 6 is better, but is naughty.

MS used to have a policy that if you owned a newer version but wanted to run an older one, that was permitted. I own Word 97 and Office 2000, so I guess I'm entitled...?

[autopope]

The way I heard it was a bit different.

With Word 5.1a for Mac out in the world, work was underway in the Mac team on Word 6 for MacOS, which was basically Word 5, with added BASIC scripting.

However, two team leads either quit or were reassigned to other projects at the wrong time, leaving the product adrift with nobody in charge, which meant it ended up dead.

The goal of harmonizing on "Word 6" as a version number was sound, but with no Mac product in sight they made the bad decision to port the Windows version to MacOS using that ghastly compatability layer, resulting in a massively bloated, sluggish product that broke all the MacOS user interface guidelines.

[liam_on_linux]

That's very interesting -- thanks, Charlie. That bit of info is totally new to me.

[claudeb]

A good reminder that version numbers are pure marketing, they were always pure marketing, and trying to make them "semantic" misses the point by cosmic distances. Thank you!