Roy Schestowitz wrote:
Homer on Wednesday :
Microsoft did not buy Excel, it was written entirely by its
own company, though Multiplan was a purchase many years ago.
I don't believe either Word or Multiplan were purchased but
were completely developed in-house. If my memory serves,
Charles Simoni was the architect for Word and probably
Multiplan although Jeff Harbors may also deserve some of the
credit. In any case, both Word and Multiplan were in
development at Microsoft in 1981 when I became the 8086
assembly language guy that was responsible for the p-code
interpreter that hosted Word, MultiPlan, and the other
products in the MultiTools line.
I purchased Multiplan for CP/M-80 and later for CP/M-86 in the
late 80's, from the Xerox Surplus Store, where I purchased an
820-II and 16/8 (820-II with expansion chassis, MFM hard disk and
8086 coprocessor card for CP/M-86 and MS-Dos 2.0).
It seemed to be a decent spreadsheet, although not as powerful as
Lotus. Seemed to be a direct competitor to VisiCalc.
Got my exposure to 8080 and Z80 assembly language, modified the
16/8 bios, manually edited the hard disk partition table,
creating 3 on the 10 MB HD. Then disassembled and modified the
Xerox CP/M-80 hard disk initialisation software to handle a
non-Xerox Miniscribe HD with 2 heads, 720 cylinders (Xerox used
Shugart, 4 heads, 360 cylinders). Back then, software was
"hardwired" to the hardware.
As for Word For Windows, I know for a fact that it was
completely written from scratch at Microsoft because I was on
the version 1.0 development team...
--
HPT
|
|
