The first Microsoft Word was developed by Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie, who previously worked for Xerox but were later hired by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to work at Microsoft.
Simonyi and Brodie were also involved in the development of Xerox Bravo, the world's first seemingly working word processor. The first version of Word, Word 1.0, was released for Xenix and MS-DOS in October 1983. The four versions developed following this release, unfortunately, did not have as great commercial success as the first version. Word for Windows, which was developed for the Microsoft Windows operating system and has a relatively better user interface, was released in 1989. But with the release of Windows 3.0 in 1990, Word was a huge commercial success. Word 1.0 was released for Windows, followed by Word 2.0 in 1991 and Word 6.0 in 1993. Subsequently, the program was renamed Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000 and Word for Office XP in order to be compatible with the commercial version names of Windows. With Word 2003, the year was reintroduced in Word's numbering. Since then Word 2007, Word 2010, Word 2013 and most recently Word 2016 have been released.
As a result of an agreement between Atari and Microsoft in 1986, Microsoft released a version of Microsoft Word running on Atari ST systems. The Atari ST version was originally released under the name Microsoft Write, although Microsoft's version of Word 1.05, which was developed for Apple Macintosh systems, was adapted for Atari. In the late 1980s and early '90s, Microsoft was distributing a limited-featured word processor with the Windows operating system under the name Microsoft Write. Unlike other versions of Word, the Atari version was produced only once and has not been updated since. Developed for Atari, Microsoft Write has become one of the two important PC applications developed to run on Atari ST. Another of these applications was WordPerfect. Microsoft Write was released for Atari ST in 1988.
Word history from 1990 to 1995
The first version of Word for Windows was released in 1990 with a price tag of $498, but at that time it was not very popular among Windows users as it was not in a dominant position among operating system users. Following Windows 3.0 released the next year, WinWord 1.1 was updated for this new operating system (as WinWord 1.0 developed for Windows 2.x could not run in protection mode on 286 and higher PCs). Developed the following year, WinWord 2.0 came with a number of improvements and solidified Word's market share. WinWord 3.0, which was developed in 1992, was developed to be used on Windows 3.1. This version was also the first version of Word to require the use of at least 386 PCs.
Early versions of Word came with some form of copy protection. The message "The tree of evil bears bitter fruit. Only the Shadow knows. Now trashing program disk" appeared on the screen of users who tried to break this protection; however, the contents of the program disk were not actually erased.