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Microsoft Word for DOS — it's FREE (and just might be useful, even if you don't use Windows or — even more improbably — MS-DOS)

By Steven Rosenberg on December 5, 2008 3:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Hey teeming masses, don't say Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates (and the Professor and Mary-Ann) never did nothing for you.

In a totally roundabout way, I learned that Microsoft is giving away — I say giving away — Microsoft Word. OK ... Microsoft Word for DOS. Remember that? I do. I actually used to run Word for DOS a bit back in the day. It was slower than ... everything else — including the admittedly harder-to-use but wildly popular WordPerfect.

At the time I couldn't imagine Word overtaking and crushing WordPerfect. But it happened.

Back to our twisted tale. I found this Lifehacker entry where one of the very best tech-book writers today, Keir Thomas (get one of his Ubuntu books already!), has an excerpt of his new "Ubuntu Kung Fu" book.

The Unix-like OS world is awash in console-based text editors. There are literally hundreds, from vi and nano to joe and emacs. But is there an actual word processor for the Unix/Linux console? Nope.

Thomas suggests running the freely downloadable Microsoft Word for DOS and using the DOSBox MS-DOS emulator to run Word as a command-line word processor.

(For specific instructions, just go to the link and scroll down until you see "Get a High-Quality (and Free) Command-Line Word Processor with Microsoft Word.").

If you just want to get your free Word for DOS, click this link and the almighty Microsoft download deity will cause it to appear on your PC. It's a self-extracting archive, so in Windows double-click it, or at a DOS prompt in the environment of your choice (A command line in windows, or the DOSBox environment in Unix/Linux) and it will turn into the executable for Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS.

Oh the humanity!

I always wondered why there wasn't a bona fide word processor for the Unix/Linux command line. I'm still wondering, but I'm laughing (inside ...) about this hack.

Did I forget to mention that Keir Thomas is a genius? He's right up there with David Pogue, Chris Negus, Carla Schroder and Mark Sobell in my pantheon of "world's greatest tech writers."