msword: Port of Microsoft Word 1.1a to x64
13 points by malxau
13 points by malxau
Fun project for sure. In a similar vein I've been enjoying being able to use the unix versions of word perfect and lotus 1-2-3 that have been made possible to run on modern linux by Tavis Ormandy.
Unfortunately it seems that Visual Studio 2022 is required to build this currently, but hopefully Visual Studio 2026 will be supported at some future point in time so I can build this and try it out.
Edit: Ok, it seems to have been as simple as just changing generator in the cmakepresets json file, but I get some linking errors due to unresolved symbol references. Perhaps I shall just revisit the thing later.
Afaict this is based on the 2014 Computer History Museum source code release, which unlike MS-DOS has never been re-released as open source. The applicable license is very strict on redistribution:
You may not distribute or publish the software or Derivative Works. […] You may publish and present papers or articles on the results of your research, and while distribution of all or substantial portions of the software is not permitted, you may include in any such publication or presentation an excerpt of up to fifty (50) lines of code for illustration purposes.
It'd be great to have it be actually open sourced like the more recent Microsoft historical source code releases, but sadly that'd probably need someone in the Microsoft Open Source group to adopt this as a personal cause.
I assume the codename "opus" is a reference to Berk Breathed's penguin character just based on how popular/iconic the character was at the time. Does anyone here know?
I asked somebody who worked on that team, she said yes, and they had plushies of that character in their offices.
That's some chutzpah naming a repo msword on that specific code forge