George Fowler, publisher of Slavica Publishers, a small academic press, still produces about 80 percent of the company's books and journals in Word 5.1. It's quicker 'than it ever ran back in the days when I first used it on a 25-MHz Quadra 700 running OS 7.1,' he said. He says it's faster than newer versions of Word, even under emulation. 'I'm a journalist and translator, and Word 5.1a still beats any word processor that has come out in the last 10 years or so.'ĭavid Ryeburn, a retired mathematician from Burnaby, British Columbia, uses Word 5.1a on a G3 iBook. 'Still using it daily on Mac OS X 10.2,' D'Agostino said. 'I have only one MS program on any computer I own, MS Word 5.1(a).' 'I've been using it for as long as it has been around,' said Barto, who runs Word 5.1 on a Power Mac G4.
Thirteen years on and many upgrades later, plenty of users are running Word 5.1 in OS X's Classic emulation environment.ĭavid Barto, a computer scientist from Poway, California, is one of them. Many of them can open and edit Word documents, automatically check your spelling, use a wide selection of free MS Word. Nostalgia for Word 5.1 is so rampant, TidBits satirized it with an April Fools' announcement that Microsoft will be releasing Word 5.1 for Mac OS X. All of the free word processors below can create, edit, and print documents.
