While many credit Simonyi as the “Father of Word,” Microsoft Corporate Vice President Peter Pathe has been the program’s legal guardian throughout the Windows Era. By 1994, Word was able to claim a 90 percent share of the word-processing market, making it one of the most successful and most well-known software products in history. That two-year head start, together with Word’s decade of development and innovation - as well as stellar product reviews - helped catapult the program to the top slot in the early 1990s. The first version of Word for Windows was released in 1989, a full two years before WordStar and WordPerfect were delivered on the new Windows operating system. As early programs such as Electric Pencil gave way to WordStar, WordPerfect and other brands, Microsoft Word laid the foundation to become the no. In addition to versions for MS-DOS, Word was among the earliest applications to appear on OS/2 and Apple’s Macintosh computers. In its early days, Word strove for acceptance in a word-processing market that boasted more than 300 different titles on multiple platforms. It was the first program to feature line breaks, bold-faced and italic fonts on screen, and typeset-quality printing. When the first version was released in 1983, it was the first word-processing product to feature the “WYSIWYG” design philosophy that what appears on screen should appear in print. The following year, Microsoft officially launched Word’s development team. Word was originally the “Bravo” product, brought to Microsoft from IBM’s Palo Alto Research Center by Charles Simonyi in 1981.

Microsoft Word for Windows, the flagship word-processing program so popular around the globe, is turning 18. With the release of Microsoft’s new generation of technologies in 2007 comes an interesting highlight about a venerable program. As Microsoft Corporate Vice President Peter Pathe prepares to retire, he discusses the lasting legacy of a product he’s overseen for more than a decade.

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