There’s an x64 Port of Microsoft Word 1.1a for Windows

A developer named John Marshall has ported Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a to x64 so it will run on Windows 11.

“This project is a fully working native Windows x64 port of Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, whose historical codename was Opus,” Marshall writes in the GitHub repository for the project. “It builds the original Word source and resources together with modern replacements for the 16-bit assembly, segmented memory, and Win16 platform boundaries. The result is the original Word application and user experience running as a 64-bit Windows executable. This is not an emulator or a reimplementation using a modern editor control.”

Marshall says he translated the original 16-bit Assembly language entry points in this 1990/1991 version of Word for Windows to fixed-width C/C++ code, mapped segmented and double-indirect memory handles to an x64-safe native runtime, adapted Win16-specific startup, messaging, graphics, file, and resource behaviors to current Win32 APIs, rebuilt original command, dialog, cursor, bitmap, and other generated assets with native host tools tied to CMAKE, and worked to make the original algorithms and application behavior compatible with Windows 11.

What he doesn’t mention is that this project was made possible by Microsoft’s 2014 release of the Word for Windows 1.1a source code alongside that for MS-DOS 1.1 (1982) and MS-DOS 2.0 (1983). You can find this source code on the Computer History Museum website. It’s a 7 MB ZIP file containing 1021 files in 33 folders.

Getting the port to run requires a bit of work: You need a recent Visual Studio version with the “Desktop development with C++” workload installed, a recent Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) release, and the CMAKE 3.25 command line build tool or newer, and then you need to run a series of PowerShell scripts provided by Marshall. I’m still working through that, but I wanted to get this post out first.