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.

[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.

[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.

[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!