Word & Excel for MIPS

Years ago when I’d bought Office 4.2 for Windows NT, it only included i386 & Alpha builds of Word and Excel in the box, and a coupon for MIPS and PowerPC.

About the only thing interesting is that it actually ran under Win32s.

But today looking at term24‘s uploads on archive.org, I saw two CD-ROM images:

I quickly fired up Qemu MIPS NT, and confirmed that both do in fact contain a MIPS version! Excel does have the PowerPC version as well.

As far as I know the only RISC platform to get apps from Office 97 was the Dec Alpha, but at least MIPS users can rejoice now, knowing that they too have been blessed with 32bit Office 4.2 apps!

One of the amazing things about NT & portable apps is that visually, they look identical. So other than me telling you that these are the MIPS native versions, there really is no way to tell.

Well, other than there is no ntvdm running. There is no WOW needed here!

100% native.

I guess the only other question is that since the Word is 1994, and Excel is from 1995, did they have earlier versions for Windows NT? It seems like everything was finally coming together for RISC NT, except the users. Would a release of 64bit Windows 2000 on Dec Alpha save the platform by bringing a strong 64bit platform with integrated JIT i386 WoW built in? (AXP64 Windows 2000 didn’t use !FX32). I guess we’ll never know.

7 thoughts on “Word & Excel for MIPS

  1. Nice find. Now I’m curious. The 2 CDs have file dates later then the Office 4.2 for NT CD. Anyone knows, what was the product, that included these two?

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