History of microsoft word applications

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When MS Office for Windows was released in , its chief competitors were both industry giants: WordPerfect for word processing , and Lotus for spreadsheets. Both of these products already had dominant market positions when Microsoft Office was launched. Microsoft Office quickly gained on the competition, however — businesses liked the idea of having their primary workstation apps come from a single software company, which hinted at greater integration between critical applications.

It also helped that Office was friendlier to the growing number of mouse-centric PC users of the early s. Instead of handwritten letters or contracts, in which penmanship might lead to errors or legal issues, the cleanly written pages that flew out of typewriters greased the wheels of commerce. As typewriters became essential in the business world, the demand grew for fast, accurate typists.

Training programs similar to the one Bruni attended proliferated. Businesses employed thousands of typists. Typewriters had no memory capabilities, making retyping documents a fact of life. But that began to change in the s with typewriters like the hugely popular IBM Selectric series that essentially launched the era of word processing. These new memory typewriters could store information on magnetic tapes and later cards. When a mistake was made, the typist would simply backspace the typewriter and retype the correct text over the original error.

The typewriter could remember the correct version so when the typist would insert a new blank sheet, the typewriter would automatically print out a flawless version of the desired text.

In the s, the invention of larger storage devices the first floppy disks and cheaper computer memory led to word processing solutions capable of storing and managing whole documents.

That was followed by the addition of cathode ray tube CRT screens and computerized printers. Now you could easily view the entire page as you were typing, go back and forth to make edits and instantly print out the results. The modern era of word processing took off. At first, there was a boom in dedicated word processors, which are essentially computers with proprietary software whose sole function was to churn out typed documents. Companies who made them, such as Vydec and Wang Laboratories, became hugely successful.

Individuals still used typewriters, but dedicated word processors took over for large offices and large-scale document production. Word processing quickly became one of the most popular applications for these new devices with programs such as WordStar, WordPerfect, MultiMate and Microsoft Word in hot demand the first version of Microsoft Word appeared on its own in and later became part of Microsoft Word Office. There were endless debates over which was the best word processor, but each one made it possible to duplicate many if not all of the functions of a dedicated word processor.

Just as Gutenberg revolutionized printing, and the typewriter revolutionized the production of business documents, the PC revolutionized word processing. Now for the price of the software and a thousand dollars plus for the PC, you could avoid spending tens of thousands of dollars on a dedicated word processing solution. The market for dedicated word processors plummeted and the history of the word processor as it had been known was essentially over.

PCs began to replace typewriters and word processors in offices throughout the world.