Office 4.2 for Windows NT

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At some time during the whole Windows NT vs OS/2 thing in the workplace, one of the funny things is that we all had to use Win16 versions of office, which I think we all agreed kind of sucked. Even at the time I thought it was rather sad that here is Microsoft pushing this new and exciting operating system, and the only applications that are available is a program to talk to mainframes (SNA Server), and a database (SQL Server). Oh sure there was MSMail, but there was no Word & Excel that the world was rapidly moving to, away from WordPerfect & 123.

So was I ever surprised to find out that there was a version of Microsoft Office for NT, and it at least ran on both i386 & Dec Alpha. The box claims that the PowerPC and MIPS versions will be along, but I don’t know if they ever shipped. But at the same time, it’d be hard to be touting these ‘advanced’ RISC CPU’s and all their glory, but when it comes to day to day work, they are running Word/Excel in emulation. I have the box with the coupon to redeem but I suspect MS would just laugh if I called them up asking for Word/Excel for the MIPS so I can run it on Qemu…. But I digress.

Naturally because of the day & age, the requirements are kind of laughable, but it was targeted towards Windows NT 3.5, with:

  • Microsoft Windows NT(tm) operating system 3.5 or later
  • 486 or higher
  • 16MB of memory
  • 59MB of disk space (minimum) 84MB maximum

So playing around with Win32s, I figured if i were to install say word into a VM, then xcopy it out, and try to run it, would it work? Win32s 1.10 wouldn’t run as this version didn’t include the new OLE 2.0 stuff… Which is why I suspect it won’t run on NT 3.1. Win32s 1.30c crashed and burnt in the worst way possible. Even Lemmings died on this version. damn.

But Win32s 1.25 actually ran it, along with Lemmings & Doom!

Word for NT on Windows 3.1

I can’t say it’s terribly useful, but considering how flakey Word 6.0 was on Windows 3.1, hell back in the day it’d been really nice to have a Win32 version.

Now I guess I ought to dig thru my stuff and see how many versions of both retail & debug Win32s I can find.

6 thoughts on “Office 4.2 for Windows NT”

  1. OK, I found out why wave sounds weren't working properly in Windows 3.1 in DosBox – IRQ was set to 5 instead of 7, after fixing that both Windows sounds and SFX in Lemmings works (but SFX in Doom still doesn't).

    BTW, Win32s I have installed in is 1.30.172. Lemmings and Doom work, but Word doesn't – says "There's not enough memory to run Word.".

  2. It seems that 1.25 is … more stable then 1.30 I recall when I actually used Win32s day to day, using 1.25 as it worked under OS/2 as well (with some 'fix')….

    By the time 1.30 came out I think we were all running Windows 95? I just remember that NT 3.5 had some good PPP support, but was too slow for day to day stuff, and 95 was amazingly fast and ran Win32 stuff way better then WinOS/2 / Win32s.

    • Nice! It’d make sense to have applications that can be scripted that way you could ‘perform a variety of tasks’ and compare the output.. Its not surprising they’d use a 32bit version of word & excel, as I’m sure as a part of their porting tools doing some ‘real world’ stuff would be key, beyond things like notepad and solitaire…

      Although I still have doubts if there ever was MIPS/PowerPC versions of excel/word.

  4. Regarding the PPC/MIPS version: I have been looking into some NT PPC stuff recently. While I found nothing substantial regarding MS Office, I did find this eBay listing:

    https://www.ebay.com/itm/Microsoft-Office-Standard-Version-4-2-Word-6-0-Excel-5-0-PowerPoint-4-0-new-box-/372750729488

    This version of Office 4.2 for NT is still shrinkwrapped and it does not have this sticker on it. It could be hint that there indeed was a release, I guess.

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