Microsoft Word Celebrates 40 Years: A Look Back, A Look Ahead

Technology company Microsoft Corp MSFT has grown over the years through a series of new products and acquisitions. The company is one of the limited few that have reached a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion dollars.

Here's a look back at one of the key product releases from Microsoft, which celebrates an anniversary on Oct. 25.

What Happened: Across the many divisions of Microsoft are products such as the Xbox, LinkedIn, Windows, Bing search and Office. Before there was Microsoft Office, there was Microsoft Word, which was first released on Oct. 25, 1983 as "Multi-Tool Word."

A "Multi-Tool Word" disk was inserted in the November 1983 issue of the PC World magazine, according to The Verge. Windows 1.0 was launched later in 1989.

The word processor software was developed by Richard Brodie and Charles Simonyi according to Brittanica. Multi-Tool Word was available to work on computers that ran the UNIX operating system. Later, the program was made to be able to run on personal computers as well.

Renamed as Microsoft Word, the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) software helped Microsoft compete with WordPerfect and WordStar.  

Microsoft highlighted the key product release in a blog post Wednesday calling 1983 "something of a Golden Age for personal computer consumers."

Among the products released in 1983 highlighted in the blog post were Lotus 1-2-3 from Lotus Software, WordPerfect, the Apple Lisa computer from Apple and Microsoft Word. Microsoft called it the "dawn of business applications."

"From its humble beginnings, Word has gone on to become one of the most popular office tools in the world, and pretty much everyone is familiar with it in one way or another," Microsoft said in the post.

The company shared a timeline infographic, which highlighted each version of Microsoft Word from the 1983 version and Microsoft Word 1.0 to 3.0, which took the company up until 1987.

The timeline ends with 2019 to today with Microsoft Word in the Microsoft 365 bundle of applications.

The first introduction of Microsoft Word pre-dated the IPO of Microsoft, as the company went public in 1986.

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What's Next: The post from Microsoft not only celebrated the past, but provided a look ahead to where Microsoft Word and the company's office applications are headed.

"We are committed to carrying the torch and building on the foundation that was put in place in 1983," the company said.

The goal of Microsoft Word continues to be making sure users can complete reading and writing tasks "efficiently."

To improve Word for the future, Microsoft is including artificial intelligence in future and current endeavors.

"Copilot provides a fundamental shift in writing & reading experience. Our goal is to continuously iterate on feedback we get from you, our users, as you create and read content, while leveraging Copilot across platforms and devices," said Microsoft.

The company said it has made it easier to co-create with others while using Word, making it the place to create, edit and review content.

"We are committed to giving Word developers the tools and capabilities they need to build amazing experiences and support custom workflows."

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