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

[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...