4 ms·

Yes. Excel took a long time to topple Lotus 123, but Lotus's failure to move to a GUI quickly enough saw Excel win. DOS Microsoft Word was before Excel I think

• jahewson 14y ago
  It was a similar story with Word Perfect, their failure to move to a GUI basically handed MS Word market dominance. Their belated port of the DOS UI was very awkward at first, and the move to 32-bit in 95 was the final straw.
• arethuza 14y ago
  The "original" Word, before Windows, was available for DOS and Xenix - I actually saw some systems using Word on Xenix in '88.
  • snogglethorpe 14y ago
    I've actually used MS Word on Windows 1.0 (around 1985ish I think). It was .... well, basically unusably horrible. As you typed, it would swap stuff in/out from floppy disk; as you might imagine, this made even just entering text an excruciating experience. Luckily for MS, systems eventually got more memory and hard disks...
    • arethuza 14y ago
      The time I saw MS Word deployed on a Xenix box it didn't work terribly well - was fine on the system console but was barely usable on serial terminals as the make of terminals (Wyse something or other) had Alt keys which did nothing. And, as far as I recall, the Alt key was pretty important in Word. Of course, this wasn't Microsoft's fault - rather the idiotic salesman who had sold all of this without checking with anyone whether it would work or not.