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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
ulfw | 15 days ago
consp | 15 days ago
qingcharles | 15 days ago
https://github.com/danielcosta/MSWORD
hnlmorg | 15 days ago
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 | 15 days ago
throw101010 | 15 days ago
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 | 15 days ago
ptx | 15 days ago
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
fragmede | 15 days ago
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 | 15 days ago
There is now a published GitHub of a derivative work.
warpech | 15 days ago
layer8 | 15 days ago
Versus the port: https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2026/08/17861716...
qingcharles | 15 days ago
https://www.neowin.net/news/developer-ported-word-for-window...
hulitu | 15 days ago
UqWBcuFx6NV4r | 15 days ago
netsharc | 15 days ago
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
fredoralive | 15 days ago
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 | 15 days ago
muterad_murilax | 15 days ago
fredoralive | 15 days ago
zatkin | 15 days ago
Not to be confused with the Anthropic LLM model Opus - what was once an old codename is as good as new once again!
trvz | 15 days ago
seri4l | 15 days ago
userbinator | 15 days ago
dsign | 15 days ago
happycube | 15 days ago
pcblues | 15 days ago
derdi | 15 days ago
IsTom | 15 days ago
wolfi1 | 15 days ago
kotaKat | 15 days ago
(Also some Norwegians and a Web browser?)
Sharlin | 15 days ago
Also, a direct cognate with "operate", "operation", etc.
hard_times | 15 days ago
layer8 | 15 days ago
ThrowawayB7 | 15 days ago
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).
spider-mario | 15 days ago
pmkary | 15 days ago
BaudouinVH | 15 days ago
firesteelrain | 15 days ago
shakna | 15 days ago
firesteelrain | 15 days ago
wolfi1 | 15 days ago
pythonRon | 15 days ago
snarfy | 15 days ago
somat | 15 days ago
avadodin | 15 days ago
Linux's remarkably stable kernel ABI is the only reason we can still use a lot of unbuildable dependency hell stuff on Docker containers.
M95D | 14 days ago
> A stable ABI is only needed when you don't have the source or you don't know enough C to fix incompatibilities with every new version.
There, I fixed it for you.
anthk | 15 days ago
pythonRon | 15 days ago
happycube | 15 days ago
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 | 15 days ago
Claude then suggested using mingw instead, which makes sense...
acmdas | 15 days ago
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 | 15 days ago
dmitrygr | 15 days ago
M95D | 14 days ago
Barely... I'm using them with Office 2003 and most of the time it's a garbage conversion.
anthk | 14 days ago
emeril | 15 days ago
kevin_thibedeau | 15 days ago
vt240 | 15 days ago
ranger_danger | 15 days ago
M95D | 14 days ago
kevin_thibedeau | 15 days ago
I have a stockpile of patches that I preserved a while back that are not readily available today.
mjg59 | 15 days ago
flopsamjetsam | 15 days ago
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.
ranger_danger | 15 days ago
semiquaver | 15 days ago
haunter | 15 days ago
All you need is this https://github.com/otya128/winevdm
bananaboy | 15 days ago
BobbyTables2 | 15 days ago
People will be shocked when they realize word didn’t require gigabytes…