Developer Justin Marshall has ported the 1990 version of Microsoft Word 1.1a to run on modern Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems. The project, hosted on GitHub under the alias jmarshall23, allows the software to run as a native 64-bit Windows application rather than through an emulator or virtual interface.
The port was built using C and C++ programming languages within Visual Studio 2022. It utilizes an x64 compatibility layer to run the version of Word that was originally 16-bit and 32-bit on modern systems. The software also integrates the original Opus resources and libraries from Word 1.1.
The project is based on the original 1990 source code, which Microsoft open-sourced in 2014. Word 1.1a was the second update released for Windows following the MS-DOS era. At the time of its release in the early 1990s, the program offered 'what you see is what you get' (WYSIWYG) technology.
During the early 1990s, DOS-based programs such as WordPerfect 5.0 and Word 5.0 featured simple interfaces, whereas Windows word processors enabled users to view the printed appearance of documents on screen. This ported version contains no AI commands, cloud storage options, or complex templates, providing only basic text formatting tools and the classic Windows design of the early 1990s.
Technical requirements and development
Building the ported application requires Visual Studio 2022, PowerShell, and CMake 3.25 or newer. The final program is generated using the x64 generator in Visual Studio 2022. The developer maintains both a release build and a debug-test build of the port, and provides instructions on GitHub for cloning the repository, referencing directories via CMake, and accessing the various builds.
While all files for the Word 1.1a port are available on the developer's GitHub repository, the developer has not yet posted the license information for the project, though there are plans to do so. Justin Marshall has previously worked on the Quake4Doom project, which combined the Quake 4 SDK with the Doom 3 engine, as well as a Duke Nukem Forever project that assembled leaked files with the idTech 4 engine.
