We probably have a multitude of programs installed on our computer, but one of the most common and iconic is Microsoft Word . Most of you associate it right now with a powerful text editor, being one of the most used applications, but you have to know that it is very different from its beginnings. And it is that the program has just turned 39, which is not little.
This is a text editor that is part of the firm’s office suite, Office, and that has just turned 39 years old, although it may not seem like it. The first thing we should know in this regard is that the application was initially called Multi Tool Word and was made available to users as a demo version on a floppy disk at the time. This early version was developed by Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie . These were two former Xerox programmers hired by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
The reason for choosing precisely these two developers is that they previously worked on the project of the first word processor created under WYSIWYG or What You See Is What You Get. In short, with this program the user could see the final format of the printed document on the screen in advance.
After the launch of this first version, for the Xenix MS-DOS platform, it was followed by four other versions that were just as simple and rudimentary and were not very successful. It must be taken into account that these first versions of the editor were used based on commands and it was not very functional.
Word evolved to reach the graphical environment
Despite its limited initial success, its top managers continued to work on new versions of Word until, in 1989, the graphical version and therefore Windows . But the real growth of this text editor and that was the way to what it is today, came in 1990 with Windows 3.0. From then on, the program began to receive new versions as mythical as Word 6.0 in 1993 or the well-known Word 95 and 97. It is also interesting to know that the absolute leadership of this specific market sector was reached by Microsoft in 2009 and since then it has continued to grow.
In turn, the 2002 version of the program became part of the software giant’s proprietary suite starting with Microsoft Office XP , which was launched in 2001. Surely many of you are fully aware that we are talking about one of the most widespread and used for decades. It is a multiplatform application that we can use to edit all kinds of text documents and that has not stopped receiving improvements. One of its most representative elements is the DOC format itself, which at the time was replaced by the current DOCX .
We are talking about a program capable of recognizing most of the current text formats , it allows the use of multiple graphic elements and it has grammar and spelling auto-correction methods. In addition, today it works together with the rest of the Office applications, including the OneDrive cloud platform. Although initially the program focused on allowing us to create ordered and correctly formatted text documents , today it goes much further, and will continue to grow and improve.