Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port (github.com)

My first guess (and probably the first guess of many of the old school nerds) was that the MS Word codename is from Opus the penguin from Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County comic strip and that seems to be correct.

High five for anyone who still remembers the brief Bill the Gates arc in the comic or the Banana Computer parody ad of Apple starring Gene Simmons (https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-banana-junior-6000-comp... , about halfway down the page).

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!)

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).

office 2003 (for word + excel at least) were peak - after the ribbon it all went downhill

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?

> 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.