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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

Wait, Microsoft used to bundle Office for free with windows? When did that happen? (I'm pretty unfamiliar with pre-2010 Microsoft so I'm genuinely wondering!)

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I vaguely recall that in the Windows 3.11 days there was a cut down version of Office (might have been called something else?) which was either free or at least frequently bundled with new PCs in the same way that Windows was.

I can’t find anything online that discusses this though. Most articles seem to talk about recent versions of Office (last 10 or 15 years) but the version I’m thinking of would have been pre-95.

You might be thinking of Microsoft Works? I don't remember it being free but it was frequently offered as a low-cost add-on.

Such a great oxymoron

I seem to remember Works was around £80, office 4.3 was around £400.

In reality whatever you had at work was free as you just brought the floppies home and installed it, which led to a generation of people being brought up on Microsoft products.

Ahh yes, that’s exactly what I’m thinking of. Thanks for the reminder.

There was Microsoft Write ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Write ) but Word/Office was NEVER bundled with Windows. I used Microsoft products from MS-DOS 5 to Windows 7, and that never happened.

Likewise (well a slightly earlier version of DOS since that’s what my high school ran on their ring token coax network, plus some (by that time) old college stand alones that you had to run something like ‘park’ to park the HDD head before powering off). In fact I’m pretty sure I’d written some of my course work in Word for DOS too. Feels like a life time ago now.

Anyhow, there definitely was an office suite (lower case O) that was bundled with some PCs. But as another HNer points out it was Microsoft Works rather than Microsoft Office.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works

(After reading the above link, Im surprised to see Works lasted so long. The last time I ever saw it “in the wild” was back on Windows 3.11)

I remember having a hard time looking to open .WKS files from some accountants here in my country who refused to stop using Works for a long time.

It's sneaky how Works muddied the water for Lotus 1-2-3 which already used `.wks` for its WorKSheet files: http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3

With Windows, no. But many, many computers were sold with Office bundled in through the 2000s. It's how my family got Office and how I think most consumer-side people did.

That never happened.

I don't remember them doing it at least. Maybe before the '97 versions?

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