Earlier quoted context omitted.
Afraid 16bit Word versions have a "Garbage" rating on Wine.
I guess I misunderstood. It was ported to 64bit I thought
was my impression as well
Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port
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Re: Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port
#42>This project is a fully working native Windows x64 port of Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, whose historical codename was Opus. Not to be confused with the Anthropic LLM model Opus - what was once an old codename is as good as new once again!
“Opus” is/was a lot of things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus#Computing
Re: Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port
#43[flagged]
ermmm care to explain whY? tis just different pointer arithmetics, and given this was written in C, shouldn't be so immensely difficult?
Because the C standard is notorious for saying things like the minimum size of an `int` is 16 bits. Changes in the size of data types would create issues when calling the Windows API or saving data to disk. Heck, the program is from the very early 1990's. C wasn't standardized until 1989 and compilers were notorious for having their own interpretation of C (what we would call extensions these days). Finally, developers often optimize large programs with machine dependent code. In the early 1990's, a full featured word processor would be considered a very large program.
Even today, C is not a terribly portable language when compared to it's modern peers. It is portable when compared to assembly languages and languages contemporary to its creation.
Re: Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would be ironic if Claude Opus was used in making this port. IMHO the README does have a bit of LLM smell to it.
I came here to say that. Though not in a bad way; the economics of what is possible but practical/impractical changes greatly with LLMs, and I suspect and hope we will be figuring out the ramifications for a while.
Agreed... I suspect we're not too far off from being able to say "port this Win16 application to Win64" if we're not there already... and most of it will be harness improvements!
Re: Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port
#45Back 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.
Re: Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port
#46Back 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 impo…
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).
Re: Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of open source is to address and concerns around copyright. And this source is not open source by the definition most people use when they refer to “open source”. It’s still proprietary but source available. However I will say, this source is unlikely to be useful to anyone beyond academic curiosity. So for the purposes of this project, the source license is “good enough”.
We should care about Microsoft's licenses exactly as much as Microsoft cares about ours.
Only if you have a lawyer department as large as theirs.
But to be fair/realistic, as an individual, I've never worried about their licenses (for myself, my friends, and family). The only time I did was when installing their software in professional/commercial contexts, that's where they do most of their enforcement as far as I know... and only when the scale is egregious.
Re: Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Top-left window icon looks garbled. A porting bug, maybe?
I think it's just that 16x16 icons didn't become a thing in Windows until Windows 95, and so older apps don't supply one. Windows will then scale down the 32x32 icon instead, and it's never really done it that attractively, and I suspect the black and white nature of this icon really suffers.
Re: Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port
#49[dead]
Re: Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, it really looks like Win 10/11. Microsoft is back to the roots now. But Word 1.0 even has 3d GUI elements. They must have had impressive computers back then.
CTL3D.DLL .. I remember installing Office for Windows 3.1. It would update this system DLL and make the UI of the entire system look more 3D. https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
I'm pretty sure it was an opt-in thing for individual programs, if an app didn't intentionally use it they kept the old look.
I've always thought that it's a bit of an undocumented and slightly forgotten bit of Windows 3.1, most things on the internet only show the flat style. I guess people doing retro things often only mess around a bit with the base OS, and don't really install things like Office 4.x on top of it.