It contains rudimentary desktop publishing capabilities and is the most widely used word processing program on the market. MS Word for Windows is available stand-alone or as part of the Microsoft Office suite. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS (1983), Apple Macintosh running the Classic Mac OS (1985), AT&T Unix PC (1985), Atari ST (1988), OS/2 (1989), Microsoft Windows (1989), SCO Unix (1994), and macOS (formerly OS X 2001).Ĭommercial versions of MS Word are licensed as a standalone product or as a component of Microsoft Office, Windows RT or the discontinued Microsoft Works suite. MS Word was first released on 10-25-1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Microsoft Word is a word processor developed by Microsoft.