Yes. And it has been fixed recently.

It’s not rendering it exactly correct, but if you look @ the Windows 2 picture there is an icon there, and it lets you go between documents. Word 1.1a has something very MDI like.

If you go for linux and almost ancient word processors, I recommend abiword.
I had it first time ~2000 on SuSE Linux and was very impressed, what I got for free, after learning/using MS-Office95 in school.

The ~2000-versions are still very small, but already powerful. They will work like a charm on a 486.

It’d be like also adding in MIPS/Alpha/PowerPC/ARM support… Or WineLib on X11 to make it a “native” Linux app. But I’d imagine there is so many more better options than Word 1.1a…

Regarding Gorilla Word 1.1a – what I learned from winfile is that it’s very hard to go anywhere without a small group of people with a clear direction in mind. If everyone has their own direction, nothing happens.

What I’d like to do to it is:
1. Continue removing Windows 2.x support;
2. Fix issues preventing it from working/working well on newer systems;
3. Move towards the more standard/later converter system (see GC1039.EXE.) What’s there now is a clear precursor but not close enough to load the Word 6/97 converters.

Beyond that though, I can’t see it ever being functionally comparable to its newer peers.

I’m going from memory but the #1 reason for the p-code thing was that it was much more smaller than using a traditional compiler. I guess they saw the Infocom Z-Machine, and wanted more of that… I mean it was great playing a PDP-10 game on a Commodore 64, but taking 10-15 seconds for the VM to page in/out and decompress between moves was… insanely slow.

What is kind of funny is that this compiler is *NOTHING* like their retail products. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.

Microsoft had this weird obsession with p-code in the mid-80s (Multiplan was written in it) as a way to maintain portability. The downside is that it was pretty slow. It never really went away with them…. look at .NET!

In the ‘opus\program’ directory of the source there should be a pre-compiled binary if I recall correctly.

I was trying to run it on PCem, on a 486SX-16 with an EGA adapter, and 8MB of RAM, and it’d crash out Windows HARD.

I haven’t looked at the ASM, but I think that Word does all kinds of weird things to the system state, like trying to take over for the OS itself, instead of just using the API’s. I guess all that kind of stuff could be decapitated, or made to be more like the OS/2 version, but the license doesn’t really allow for online collaboration…. and I don’t know about doing some kind of gorilla Word 1.1a, kind of like the “OpenNT 4.5” stuff.