First Microsoft Office: June 19, 1989, for Mac

The first Microsoft Office was the Macintosh version released on 19 June 1989. The 1989 entry of Microsoft's own corporate history, "The History of Microsoft", records that Office for the Macintosh became available that day and lists its contents as Word 4.00, Excel 2.20, PowerPoint 2.01 and Mail 1.37. The history goes out of its way to note that this was the first version of Office.

Office for Windows did not appear until more than a year later, on 1 October 1990, with three applications: Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Office began on Apple's Mac, not on Windows.

What was in the first Office

	Macintosh (19 June 1989)	Windows (1 October 1990)
Word processor	Word 4.00	Word (1.1)
Spreadsheet	Excel 2.20	Excel (2.1d)
Presentations	PowerPoint 2.01	PowerPoint (2.0)
E-mail	Mail 1.37	None

The Mac version numbers and the Windows line-up come from Microsoft's corporate history. The Windows version numbers in brackets are not in that history; they are taken from Wikipedia's version table, which cites InfoWorld of 1 October 1990.

The Mac edition included an e-mail program. Microsoft's history describes the four applications as providing the tools for the essential business tasks of most business professionals.

Why the Mac came first

In 1989 Microsoft's leading applications had grown up on the Mac first. According to the corporate history, Excel shipped to retail stores for the Macintosh in 1985, while the Windows version shipped in November 1987; and Microsoft acquired Forethought, the developer of PowerPoint, on 30 July 1987. On the Windows side, Word for Windows reached retail in January 1990, and Windows 3.0 — the version that finally drew third-party applications to Windows — was announced on 22 May 1990.

Office for Windows arrived a little over four months after Windows 3.0. That was roughly when Windows had the foundation to carry such a bundle.

Office on one CD-ROM

On 1 August 1989 Microsoft announced that the Macintosh Office would also ship on CD-ROM. According to the press release distributed by Business Wire:

Item	Detail
Applications	Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Mail
Also on the disc	Documentation for each product, searchable electronically, plus animated and narrated tutorials
Third-party extras	A thesaurus, a document comparison program, a linear programming program, templates, clip art, a macro package and more
Requirements	2 MB of memory (4 MB for the multimedia introductions), System 6.0.2 or later, HyperCard 1.2.2 or later, a hard disk and a CD-ROM player
Suggested retail price	US$949
Availability	Expected by the end of September

Microsoft billed it as the first general business software for Macintosh systems to be made available on CD-ROM — the company's own claim. The release also carried a comment from John Sculley, chairman and CEO of Apple, who said it was not surprising that Microsoft would be the pioneer in bringing mainstream business applications to CD-ROM.

Bill Gates was quoted too:

"The compact disc provides a super medium for delivering large amounts of information to computer users."

Microsoft had shipped its first CD-ROM product in September 1987, according to its history, and the Office disc carried the same idea over: replace a box of thick paper manuals with one disc and a search engine.

Selling a bundle

What was new about Office was less any single application than the way it was sold. Word, Excel and PowerPoint were each sold on their own. Office put them in one box, as a complete set of tools for documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

The Mac edition went further and included mail. The 1989 Office put the tools for writing documents and the tool for sending them to other people in the same box. The first Windows edition did not; it started as three applications.

The first few versions

According to Wikipedia's version table, which cites contemporary InfoWorld reports among other sources, the contents of Office shifted a little in each of the first few releases.

Released	Version	Contents
19 Jun 1989	Mac, first edition	Word 4.0, Excel 2.2, PowerPoint 2.01, Mail 1.37
1 Oct 1990	Windows, first edition	Word 1.1, Excel 2.1d, PowerPoint 2.0
4 Mar 1991	Windows 1.5	Excel moves to 3.0
21 May 1991	Mac 1.5	Excel 3.0 and Mail 3.0
8 Jul 1991	Windows 1.6	Mail 2.1 added

On that reading, mail did not join the Windows bundle until version 1.6, nine months after the first Windows edition. The Mac and Windows suites were never identical at the start; each was assembled from whichever versions of the applications existed on its platform at the time. Because this table comes from a secondary compilation rather than Microsoft's own history, the version numbers are best read as a guide rather than a record.

Microsoft in 1989

According to its corporate history, Microsoft's sales for fiscal 1989 totalled US$804.53 million, with 4,037 employees. In fiscal 1990 revenue passed US$1 billion for the first time. Office arrived as Microsoft was growing in both operating systems and applications.

For the company see Microsoft and the Microsoft timeline; for the Mac itself, the launch of the Macintosh. For the founder, see Bill Gates.

The First Microsoft Office Suite

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