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Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

If anyone's interested in Microsoft Word for DOS 5.5, there's a free download from Microsoft. (Microsoft released this as freeware some years ago)

http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/...

To install: C:\> Wd55_ben.exe - d

(note the spaces; or just use unzip on Linux)

I just installed it on DOSBox. Works great! (brings back memories of Doogie Howser typing on a blue-screen on his PS/2)

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Word 5.5 was incredibly powerful and amazingly stable. I used it to generate 1,000+ page manuals. Word has progressed in many ways but it is generally not better for huge documents than it was then.

I'm thinking this could still be useful as a distraction-free word processor for writers today.

It runs under DOSBox perfectly, saves Word .doc files to the underlying file system (which could well be a Dropbox folder if cloud syncing is needed). Or Google Drive even, which makes it interoperable with Google Docs.

And because it's a completely text-based UI, there's no temptation to mess around with formatting (except maybe bold text).

Bah. I was a very serious and intense user of Word 4.x and 5.0, but 5.5 stripped out its native (and idiosyncratic) interface for a character-mode and hokey version of Windows' CUA menus. I hated it, and stayed on 5.0 until I eventually had to switch to Word for Windows (which, fortunately, eventually became usable).

Cool! This was the absolute acme of word processing software -- it's been downhill ever since. If only it worked on Ubuntu 10.04; linux has gone downhill since then.

Word 5.5, Harvard Project Manager, and Santa Cruz Operation Unix, those were the days. I got stuff done.

Well I'm using Kubuntu 20.04 as my daily driver -- I still like it for the most part (I've been using various flavors of Linux since 1998).

Did DOSbox not work on Ubuntu 10.04? I suspect you could have run this on Ubuntu 10.04...

You can download and build the source code to Word 1.1 for Windows and OS/2. WineVDM can even run it.

Although it predates the inclusion of TrueType it still is a capable word processor for the price of setting up a dos extender (or OS/2) to compile.

I like to install stuff like this in DOS 6.2 Running on a VM on my ibm x3650 M3 with Level 5 RAID, running Server 2012 R2, with an IBM LTO6 Tape Library backup system and Backblaze cloud backup....

I think I might be crazy..

I wonder how hard would it be to implement something like Wine, but for DOS.

Dosbox can be run together with Freedos in a command line mode. Wine also can (on 32 bit machines) run many DOS programs.

If you are content to run a full emulator, DOSBox + FreeDOS is already a practically perfect emulation.

Code syntax is helpful when spaces are important, they read more obviously in fixed-width (start line with 4 spaces)

    C:\> Wd55_ben.exe - d

At the risk of nitpicking, you only need two leading spaces here.

Of course another two are harmless, they just indent farther than you need.

Thanks! I assumed it was doing it markdown style like reddit and other places, but I guess not

  Two space indent test

Good to know!

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