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. So, to celebrate its 40th birthday, we decided to take a look at how we got here and also share where we’re going.
Tonya and I have a long history with Word. Although we primarily used WriteNow at Cornell University during our undergraduate years from 1985 through 1989, we often helped users with Word while working in Cornell University’s public computer rooms. Two years after we graduated, a college friend of Tonya’s encouraged her to apply for a job at Microsoft. She was hired and spent the next two years doing phone and online support for Word 4 and Word 5. (So many people considered Word 5 to be the pinnacle of the app’s history that Tonya later penned two April Fools’ spoof articles about it: “Microsoft Word 5.1 for Mac OS X,” 1 April 2003, and “Microsoft Word 5.1 Returns… to the iPad,” 1 April 2011.) She also helped edit the manual for Word 6, Microsoft’s first attempt at a cross-platform version. I applied for a position as a Word program manager and got an interview but was not offered the job due to my lack of design skills, a rejection I took as a compliment, given my low opinion of Word’s interface.
Word 5 was indeed perfect.