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  • Hacker News
  • No compiled binary is available?
    by ranger_danger
  • If you’re the target audience you don’t need one.
    by semiquaver
  • Cool!
    by pmkary
  • how complicated would a port to linux be ?
    by BaudouinVH
  • Just use WINE?
    by firesteelrain
  • This was the first thing that crossed my mind when I read about this port. It's heartening to find out I'm not the only one!
    by pythonRon
  • 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!)

    by happycube
  • Should also add disk space to the requirement list.

    People will be shocked when they realize word didn’t require gigabytes…

    by BobbyTables2
  • WinWord 2 or maybe 6 had everything I ever needed.
    by bananaboy
  • A screenshot or two would have been nice
    by ulfw
  • Might the lack there of be copyright related? I guess not something you want to burn your hands on.
    by consp
  • There is a screenshot in the original source code release: https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-...
    by warpech
  • There are pics from the developer in this article (not sure why he neglected them in the README):

    https://www.neowin.net/news/developer-ported-word-for-window...

    by qingcharles
  • Tried to build it but it references a `cmake/GenerateMenuHelpHeader.cmake` that seems to be absent from the repository?
    by spider-mario
  • 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

    All you need is this https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

    by haunter
  • 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.

    by acmdas
  • > Dan Bricklin's Demo

    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.

    by flopsamjetsam
  • 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?
    by mjg59
  • office 2003 (for word + excel at least) were peak - after the ribbon it all went downhill
    by emeril
  • 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).
    by d3Xt3r