No hardware intended for the consumer market can survive without the right applications, and Bill Gates and his colleagues at microsoft when, in the 1980s, they decided to become perhaps the first successful software company in history. As a consequence, we now have real paradigms, such as WindowsWord and ExcelBut there was a time when it wasn’t.
We already told you once about how Excel didn’t become popular until well into the 90s, but now we’re going to talk about a perhaps more popular program that practically had no direct competitor until the arrival of web apps like Google Docs. We are talking, of course, about Microsoft Word.
YOU CAN SEE: What programs were used before Microsoft Excel?
Word has become one of the favorite programs for text processing on computers. So much so that the very word ‘document’ is commonly referred to as ‘a word’, as if they were synonyms.
This wasn’t always the case, and it’s fair to say that word processors existed long before Word was even designed. Here we will make a recount of the main programs of this type that were popular before.
Unlike spreadsheets, word processing did see many attempts at commercial products before the advent of the personal computer in the late 1970s. Many companies, including IBM, designed computers and microcomputers that had no other application. more than document creation.
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WordStar
The first software word processor was Electric Pencilreleased in 1976, which was quickly superseded by perhaps the first commercially popular alternative: WordStarfrom 1978, created in 1978 for CP/M-80 systems.
Electric Pencil, the first software word processor in history. Photo: Diffusion
WordStar is quite similar to the word processors that came with every BASIC-like operating system on PCs in the 1980s, and can still be seen on Linux systems today. Photo: Diffusion
The original platform of WordStar turned out to be important, since already in the 80s the system that began to become popular everywhere was MS-DOS from Microsoft. The developers of WordStar adapted a version for that system, but since the base of it was based on ZIP/M It was difficult for them to add new features and, over time, it became obsolete.
WordPerfect
This led to the popularity of a new word processor called WordPerfectwhich briefly rose in popularity before the advent of a new paradigm: laser printers.
WordPerfect innovated with options like footers and tables. Photo: Diffusion
Laser printers and WYSIWYG programs
Around 1983, the PC industry was well established in the business public, for which simple calculation applications with terminals and rather poor interfaces (black screen with green text) were enough. However, there was already much interest in extending the popularity of the computer to the home environment.
Steve Jobs was one of the main evangelizers of that idea, and the emblematic macintosh of 1984 was the fruit of his philosophy. The graphical interface of these new machines allowed the adoption of different fonts, which could be stretched without losing quality and thus be able to be printed with great quality thanks to the laser printers that began to become popular at that time.
Microsoft Word for Macintosh. Photo: Diffusion
Soon, the demand for word processing began to require nuance aestheticand thus the new software industry was born WYSIWYGan acronym in English that means “you get what you see” (what you see is what you get).
Word and MacWrite were the first popular WYSIWYG programs. Photo: Diffusion
The first programs to popularize this paradigm were MacWrite for the Macintosh (1983) and the well-known Microsoft Word, which came out a year later for the IBM PC in 1984. Over time, Apple lost ground in the personal computer market, and with the hegemony that Windows achieved later in the 90s, Word became the most widely used word processor in the world.