Back 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 19 hours ago [-]
FWIW, 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 13 hours ago [-]
Microslop’s free “Office format converters” pack from Microsoft adds support for new office formats to old office versions. Read and write.
emeril 16 hours ago [-]
office 2003 (for word + excel at least) were peak - after the ribbon it all went downhill
kevin_thibedeau 14 hours ago [-]
I just installed my copy in a new Win10 VM. With the added OOXML support pack, there's nothing left wanting.
vt240 11 hours ago [-]
Does the activation still work for these are do you have to use a hack to get them running? I still have a TON of older Office 2003 licenses, I'd love to go back. I've hated modern Office with the ribbon for half my life now.
kevin_thibedeau 10 hours ago [-]
The product keys still work. You can skip online activation. Only annoyance is needing to run once as admin to make the EULA acceptance write to the registry.
I have a stockpile of patches that I preserved a while back that are not readily available today.
ranger_danger 11 hours ago [-]
Please don't. There are so many unpatched exploits for old Office... opening any document could trash your whole system or silently steal information from you.
mjg59 14 hours ago [-]
https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/wordperfect.html describes getting the UNIX release of Word Perfect running on modern Linux. There was a SCO release of Word in 1990, so plausibly that could be fudged into a similar setup?
flopsamjetsam 11 hours ago [-]
> Dan Bricklin's Demo
There's a name I haven't heard in a while. During our undergrad (90s), we used it to mock up UI designs for one of our early courses.
haunter 11 hours ago [-]
If 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
Top-left window icon looks garbled. A porting bug, maybe?
fredoralive 18 hours ago [-]
I think it's just that 16x16 icons didn't become a thing in Windows until Windows 95, and so older apps don't supply one. Windows will then scale down the 32x32 icon instead, and it's never really done it that attractively, and I suspect the black and white nature of this icon really suffers.
hulitu 24 hours ago [-]
Wow, 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.
netsharc 22 hours ago [-]
CTL3D.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.
I'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.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 22 hours ago [-]
It’s mere decades ago!
emeril 16 hours ago [-]
so true - modern windows has no contrast between windows - so terrible
Might the lack there of be copyright related? I guess not something you want to burn your hands on.
qingcharles 1 days ago [-]
The 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):
The 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”.
ptx 21 hours ago [-]
More 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.
We should care about Microsoft's licenses exactly as much as Microsoft cares about ours.
throw101010 18 hours ago [-]
Only 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 17 hours ago [-]
I don't have a lawyer department. What I do have is a server paid in XMR.
fragmede 21 hours ago [-]
The license isn't really open source. It's more like source available. Non-commercial use only.
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 20 hours ago [-]
It’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.
BaudouinVH 21 hours ago [-]
how complicated would a port to linux be ?
happycube 17 hours ago [-]
I prompted Claude Opus 5 (I don't really have the Fable tokens to spare) to do just that (via winelib). It's gotten to the point where it opens, runs for three seconds, and abruptly exits.
edit: got it running but a ton of things are do-nothing, and the fonts are completely rubbish. Not really worth posting ATM, but I'll see if it can fix things further by running the UI tests and telling it some of the things that don't work...
(That it was able to build and run at all with just a few prompts is a HFS moment, though!)
happycube 16 hours ago [-]
An interesting thing that came up is that MSVC uses 32-bit longs instead of 64, so a pure gcc/winelib build is another level of 64-bit porting.
Claude then suggested using mingw instead, which makes sense...
pythonRon 20 hours ago [-]
This was the first thing that crossed my mind when I read about this port. It's heartening to find out I'm not the only one!
firesteelrain 20 hours ago [-]
Just use WINE?
pythonRon 20 hours ago [-]
A native Linux application would be preferable, even if it does work with WINE (which I don't know... yet).
snarfy 20 hours ago [-]
Win32 is Linux's only stable ABI.
somat 15 hours ago [-]
A fair statement, but a stable ABI is only needed when you don't have the source. Seeing as most of the value proposition of Linux is that having the source is good, I find no fault in an unstable ABI.
avadodin 6 hours ago [-]
Source available is of little use for many of the current breed of languages and libraries. Even standard C support is starting to break down as incompatible "standard" newC is being pushed because some C++ guy didn't like K&R function definitions.
Linux's remarkably stable kernel ABI is the only reason we can still use a lot of unbuildable dependency hell stuff on Docker containers.
anthk 14 hours ago [-]
Winemaker + winegcc.
shakna 20 hours ago [-]
Afraid 16bit Word versions have a "Garbage" rating on Wine.
firesteelrain 20 hours ago [-]
I guess I misunderstood. It was ported to 64bit I thought
wolfi1 20 hours ago [-]
was my impression as well
pmkary 23 hours ago [-]
Cool!
ranger_danger 14 hours ago [-]
No compiled binary is available?
semiquaver 14 hours ago [-]
If you’re the target audience you don’t need one.
Oliveaniss 24 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hnsmomdpvp 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
RinatNabiev 24 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
larodi 21 hours ago [-]
ermmm care to explain whY? tis just different pointer arithmetics, and given this was written in C, shouldn't be so immensely difficult?
II2II 20 hours ago [-]
Because 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.
InfraScaler 21 hours ago [-]
Hold on let them ask Claude again
yieldcrv 21 hours ago [-]
it’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
zatkin 24 hours 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!
ThrowawayB7 17 hours ago [-]
My first guess (and probably the first guess of many of the old school nerds) was that the MS Word codename is from Opus the penguin from Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County comic strip and that seems to be correct.
It’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 22 hours ago [-]
For erudites Word is a much better name. We seldom use that verbum.
userbinator 24 hours ago [-]
Would be ironic if Claude Opus was used in making this port. IMHO the README does have a bit of LLM smell to it.
dsign 24 hours ago [-]
I 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 19 hours ago [-]
Agreed... 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!
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.
I have a stockpile of patches that I preserved a while back that are not readily available today.
There's a name I haven't heard in a while. During our undergrad (90s), we used it to mock up UI designs for one of our early courses.
All you need is this https://github.com/otya128/winevdm
People will be shocked when they realize word didn’t require gigabytes…
https://www.neowin.net/news/developer-ported-word-for-window...
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
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.
Versus the port: https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2026/08/17861716...
https://github.com/danielcosta/MSWORD
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”.
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...
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
[2] https://opensource.org/osd
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.
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.
There is now a published GitHub of a derivative work.
edit: got it running but a ton of things are do-nothing, and the fonts are completely rubbish. Not really worth posting ATM, but I'll see if it can fix things further by running the UI tests and telling it some of the things that don't work...
(That it was able to build and run at all with just a few prompts is a HFS moment, though!)
Claude then suggested using mingw instead, which makes sense...
Linux's remarkably stable kernel ABI is the only reason we can still use a lot of unbuildable dependency hell stuff on Docker containers.
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.
but some don’t
agentic engineering would make this easy, especially when following the blueprint of the projects that do this translation already
Not to be confused with the Anthropic LLM model Opus - what was once an old codename is as good as new once again!
High five for anyone who still remembers the brief Bill the Gates arc in the comic or the Banana Computer parody ad of Apple starring Gene Simmons (https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-banana-junior-6000-comp... , about halfway down the page).
Also, a direct cognate with "operate", "operation", etc.
(Also some Norwegians and a Web browser?)