Today, Microsoft Word is one of the most essential tools in any workplace - you've most certainly heard of it. But 41 years ago, a program like Microsoft Word was unheard of until, on September 29, 1983, Microsoft released Word 1.0, which eventually took the world by storm and dominated every office space in the U.S. throughout the late 80s and early 90s. Of course, Microsoft didn't stop there, they've continually updated and optimized the software since then. It grew strides ahead of any competition, and after it was bundled with the first version of Windows OS, it became a staple in both the office and the home.

Word started on DOS

In September 1983, Microsoft had yet to release the first version of Windows, so Word was not available there at first. The initial version of Microsoft Word was designed for DOS-based PCs, specifically Microsoft's own MS-DOS, and Xenix, a Unix-based operating system also created by the company a few years prior. Eventually, "Word 1.0" also came to Macintosh and Windows, but these three versions of the software were completely different.

Word 1.0 for DOS was fairly innovative in that it was one of the first word processors, at the time, to make full use of a computer mouse, which was timed nicely as Microsoft had launched its first mouse around then too. The mouse naturally offered more intuitive input in some cases. Word also supported both text and graphical modes with a "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) interface, which attempted to accurately reproduce the final result of a typed document with support for things like italic, bold, and underlined text.

Despite being innovative for its time, Word 1.0 for DOS didn't gain much traction in the market, as there was already other competition from companies like WordPerfect and WordStar with word processors of their own.

It took years for Word to come to Windows

Microsoft announced the first version of Windows later in 1983, and it launched in 1985, but Word wasn't released for Windows until 1989. It took quite a while for Microsoft to utilize it within its own OS, but at the time, Windows itself wasn't that popular, either. Things started changing when Windows 3.0 launched, and it received a new version of Word shortly thereafter.

From that point forward, Microsoft released versions of Word for Windows, DOS, and Mac until 1993, when the DOS version was dropped altogether. Of course, versions for Mac and Windows still exist to this day.

Word was integrated into the Microsoft Office suite, alongside Excel and PowerPoint, in 1990. This provided users with spreadsheet and presentation programs, alongside word processing. To this day, these products (and others) are still sold together as part of the Office suite or the Microsoft 365 subscription.

Even without Windows, Microsoft Word was a powerhouse

From its humble beginnings, Microsoft Word has gone on to become one of the most popular office tools in the world, and pretty much everyone is familiar with it in one way or another. Word has expanded onto mobile platforms and even the web, with these versions offering somewhat reduced capabilities at no cost. This was most likely done in response to many Microsoft Office users turning to Google Workspace online instead.

Microsoft Word also now supports far more than just text editing. In addition to all kinds of complex formatting options, Word lets you add images, shapes, videos, and even 3D objects to documents. Naturally, many of these can't be printed, but the nature of documents in general has become much more focused on the digital space now. So these kinds of features can be useful if you're making documents to be shared and viewed on a laptop or desktop computer instead of print media. That being said, Word still includes all the tools you need to properly format documents for printing, too.

It will be interesting to see what the future holds for this software, as it has passed the 40-year mark and is marching forward strongly into its next decade.