There are few software in the world as used and known as Microsoft Word, yet like most of good things that come from the company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, completely lacks a narrative that gives a dimension that is not epic, but interesting to a tool that has objectively changed the way people write on a personal computer.
The first version was released on September 29, 1983 (although many sites generally refer to October of that year as the launch date). 1983 it had been a key year for Microsoft: it opened with the resignation, in February, of Paul Allen as executive vice president and with the introduction, in March, of Ms-Dos 2.0, the operating system of all PCs compatible with IBM. November 10 Windows will come, an extension of Ms-Dos with a windowed application management system which, however, will only really hit the market two years later. Meanwhile, the first version of Microsoft Word will arrive.
It had been made by two developers (Charles Simonyl and Richard Brodie) which Gates and Allen had hired in 1981 from Xerox, where they had developed a first word processor. That version of Word and the 4 later ones were not very successful. Then it became a standard. At the time, there was another writing software on the market, Word Perfect, but Microsoft’s outperformed the competition. There was also a lawsuit for it and Microsoft won it. In court, Gates said Word won because it was better, not because he was given an advantage: “We worked very hard. It was the most challenging and challenging project we have ever faced.”
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