Word 4.0 came to market in 1989, the same year that Apple spun off its software to its Claris subsidiary and MacWrite stopped being free.

Unfortunately, Word 3.0 was “plagued with bugs”, and within a few months Microsoft fixed them and mailed free Word 3.0.1 disks to all registered Word 3.0 users. The second version was called 3.0 to match the numbering of the current DOS version.) The first version of Word for Mac was released in 1985, and Word 3.0 in 1987. Word for MS-DOS had been written to support high-resolution displays, even though DOS computers didn’t yet have them, which made it easier to port the program to the Macintosh.

The mouse and semi-WYSIWYG display gave Word two big advantages over Wordstar, then the most popular word processing software in the world, and WordPerfect, the rising star in the DOS world. Word for MS-DOS was designed to work with a mouse, and Microsoft even offered a bundle that included Word and the new-fangled input device. Word was the first WYSIWYG (or semi-WYSIWYG) word processing program for DOS – it could display bold, italic, and underlined text, although it could not display different typefaces or sizes. It was ported to MS-DOS later in the year, where the name was simplified to Word. Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi, Bravo’s “father”, in 1981, and Multi-Tool Word was released for Xenix in 1983. Word was rooted in Bravo, the GUI word processor created at Xerox PARC. With these essentially free apps bundled with the computer, it would be an uphill battle to sell alternative word processing and paint programs – but that didn’t stop anyone. When Apple introduced the original Macintosh in January 1984, it also introduced two programs so Mac users could do something with the new computer, MacWrite and MacPaint. It has been the dominant word processing program on the Mac since 1988 and on Windows since 1993. It was renamed Microsoft Word and ported to MS-DOS in 1983, the Macintosh in 1985, and Windows in 1989. Microsoft Word began life as Multi-Tool Word for Xenix in 1983.

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