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Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port
- ulfw 2mo agoA screenshot or two would have been nice
- consp 2mo agoMight the lack there of be copyright related? I guess not something you want to burn your hands on.
- qingcharles 2mo agoThe original source for WfW 1.1a was open sourced (I realize that doesn't mean there isn't copyright, but it's unlikely to be the reason that there are no pics): https://github.com/danielcosta/MSWORD https://github.com/danielcosta/MSWORD
- hnlmorg 2mo agoThe point of open source is to address and concerns around copyright. And this source is not open source by the definition most people use when they refer to “open source”. It’s still proprietary but source available. However I will say, this source is unlikely to be useful to anyone beyond academic curiosity. So for the purposes of this project, the source license is “good enough”.
- inigyou 2mo agoWe should care about Microsoft's licenses exactly as much as Microsoft cares about ours.
- throw101010 2mo agoOnly if you have a lawyer department as large as theirs. But to be fair/realistic, as an individual, I've never worried about their licenses (for myself, my friends, and family). The only time I did was when installing their software in professional/commercial contexts, that's where they do most of their enforcement as far as I know... and only when the scale is egregious.
- inigyou 2mo agoI don't have a lawyer department. What I do have is a server paid in XMR.
- ptx 2mo agoMore concretely, Microsoft's license [0] gives you at most one of the four essential freedoms: 0. Freedom to run for any purpose? No. 1. Freedom to modify the program? Maybe; Microsoft can revoke it without cause at any time. 2. Freedom to distribute unmodified? No. 3. Freedom to distribute modified? No. I'm using the free software definition [1] because it's simpler and clearer than the open source definition [2], which is usually considered mostly equivalent in practice, but as far as I can tell Microsoft's license satisfies zero of the latter's ten criteria, apart from perhaps non-discrimination and technology-neutrality. Most of the criteria of the open source definition have to do with distribution, which is not allowed by Microsoft's license. [0] https://computerhistory.org/blogs/microsoft-research-license-agreement-msword-v-1-1a/ https://computerhistory.org/blogs/microsoft-research-license... [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html [2] https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
- puzzleincomplet 2mo ago[dead]
- fragmede 2mo agoThe license isn't really open source. It's more like source available. Non-commercial use only. https://github.com/danielcosta/MSWORD/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/danielcosta/MSWORD/blob/master/LICENSE says You may use, copy, compile, and create Derivative Works of the software, and run the software and Derivative Works on simulators or hardware solely for non-commercial research, experimentation, and educational purposes. Examples of non-commercial uses are teaching, academic research, public demonstrations, and personal experimentation. “Derivative Works” means modifications to the software, in source code or object code form, made by you pursuant to this agreement. You may copy and refer to any documentation provided as part of the software. You may not distribute or publish the software or Derivative Works. You may not use or test the software to provide a commercial service unless Microsoft permits you to do so under another agreement. You may publish and present papers or articles on the results of your research, and while distribution of all or substantial portions of the software is not permitted, you may include in any such publication or presentation an excerpt of up to fifty (50) lines of code for illustration purposes.
- firesteelrain 2mo agoIt’s interesting that the license says “You may not distribute or publish the software or Derivative Works.” There is now a published GitHub of a derivative work.
- warpech 2mo agoThere is a screenshot in the original source code release: https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-1-1a-source-code/?key=microsoft-word-for-windows-1-1a-source-code https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-...
- layer8 2mo agoDirect link: https://computerhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/ms-word-for-win-word-for-windows-1.1a-2.png https://computerhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/ms-wo... Versus the port: https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2026/08/1786171652_word_1.1a_port.webp https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2026/08/17861716...
- qingcharles 2mo agoThere are pics from the developer in this article (not sure why he neglected them in the README): https://www.neowin.net/news/developer-ported-word-for-windows-11a-from-1990-to-run-natively-on-windows-11/ https://www.neowin.net/news/developer-ported-word-for-window...
- hulitu 2mo agoWow, it really looks like Win 10/11. Microsoft is back to the roots now. But Word 1.0 even has 3d GUI elements. They must have had impressive computers back then.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2mo agoIt’s mere decades ago!
- netsharc 2mo agoCTL3D.DLL .. I remember installing Office for Windows 3.1. It would update this system DLL and make the UI of the entire system look more 3D. https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.betaarchive.com%2Fimageupload%2F2017-01%2F1484489955.th.90198.png&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=d92d4f4d30765b52214c9ae17f6923ece03fb54d17323fe86fea5ab66c0fd328 https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
- fredoralive 2mo agoI'm pretty sure it was an opt-in thing for individual programs, if an app didn't intentionally use it they kept the old look. I've always thought that it's a bit of an undocumented and slightly forgotten bit of Windows 3.1, most things on the internet only show the flat style. I guess people doing retro things often only mess around a bit with the base OS, and don't really install things like Office 4.x on top of it.
- emeril 2mo agoso true - modern windows has no contrast between windows - so terrible
- Oliveaniss 2mo ago[flagged]
- zatkin 2mo ago>This project is a fully working native Windows x64 port of Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, whose historical codename was Opus. Not to be confused with the Anthropic LLM model Opus - what was once an old codename is as good as new once again!
- trvz 2mo agoIt’s a common word amongst people with even a bit of erudition. In truth, using it for any kind of software is overusing it.
- seri4l 2mo agoFor erudites Word is a much better name. We seldom use that verbum.
- userbinator 2mo agoWould be ironic if Claude Opus was used in making this port. IMHO the README does have a bit of LLM smell to it.
- dsign 2mo agoI came here to say that. Though not in a bad way; the economics of what is possible but practical/impractical changes greatly with LLMs, and I suspect and hope we will be figuring out the ramifications for a while.
- happycube 2mo agoAgreed... I suspect we're not too far off from being able to say "port this Win16 application to Win64" if we're not there already... and most of it will be harness improvements!
- pcblues 2mo agoCheck in the github src directory.
- RinatNabiev 2mo ago[flagged]
- larodi 2mo agoermmm care to explain whY? tis just different pointer arithmetics, and given this was written in C, shouldn't be so immensely difficult?
- InfraScaler 2mo agoHold on let them ask Claude again
- yieldcrv 2mo agoit’s just because allot of projects throw in the towel but some don’t agentic engineering would make this easy, especially when following the blueprint of the projects that do this translation already
- II2II 2mo agoBecause the C standard is notorious for saying things like the minimum size of an `int` is 16 bits. Changes in the size of data types would create issues when calling the Windows API or saving data to disk. Heck, the program is from the very early 1990's. C wasn't standardized until 1989 and compilers were notorious for having their own interpretation of C (what we would call extensions these days). Finally, developers often optimize large programs with machine dependent code. In the early 1990's, a full featured word processor would be considered a very large program. Even today, C is not a terribly portable language when compared to it's modern peers. It is portable when compared to assembly languages and languages contemporary to its creation.
- spider-mario 2mo agoTried to build it but it references a `cmake/GenerateMenuHelpHeader.cmake` that seems to be absent from the repository?
- pmkary 2mo agoCool!
- BaudouinVH 2mo agohow complicated would a port to linux be ?
- firesteelrain 2mo agoJust use WINE?
- shakna 2mo agoAfraid 16bit Word versions have a "Garbage" rating on Wine.
- firesteelrain 2mo agoI guess I misunderstood. It was ported to 64bit I thought
- wolfi1 2mo agowas my impression as well
- pythonRon 2mo agoA native Linux application would be preferable, even if it does work with WINE (which I don't know... yet).
- acmdas 2mo agoBack in '85-6 I developed training for USDA (using Dan Bricklin's Demo) for a curses version of Word 5 that ran on 3B2s with SysV v2. I'd be very happy to see that ported to Linux or one of the BSDs. In fact, I'd love to see both Word and Excel '98 on one of my workstations. IMHO things went South after that. I had to use Windows and Office off and on with clients up to 2010 and I'm sure that Excel provided some important edge-case functionality after '98, but for me the UI went steadily to sh*t.
- d3Xt3r 2mo agoFWIW, Office 97 works perfectly under Wine, so there's nothing stopping you from continuing to use it, well, except maybe the lack of support for modern OOXML formats. An alternative could be Abiword and Gnumeric, both are super lightweight and retain the classic Office 97-style UI and support OOXML formats (though somewhat limited compared to LibreOffice).
- dmitrygr 2mo agoMicroslop’s free “Office format converters” pack from Microsoft adds support for new office formats to old office versions. Read and write.
- emeril 2mo agooffice 2003 (for word + excel at least) were peak - after the ribbon it all went downhill
- 2mo ago
- hnsmomdpvp 2mo ago[dead]
- ranger_danger 2mo agoNo compiled binary is available?
- semiquaver 2mo agoIf you’re the target audience you don’t need one.
- haunter 2mo agoIf you need something much easier then you can run Word 2.0 (well any Windows 3.0+ 16bit app) easily on x64 Windows 10/11 https://files.catbox.moe/dy4bqy.png https://files.catbox.moe/dy4bqy.png All you need is this https://github.com/otya128/winevdm https://github.com/otya128/winevdm
- bananaboy 2mo agoWinWord 2 or maybe 6 had everything I ever needed.
- BobbyTables2 2mo agoShould also add disk space to the requirement list. People will be shocked when they realize word didn’t require gigabytes…