Introduction
Word for Windows 1.x and 2.0, released from 1989 to 1991, saved documents as a single plain file. There is no compound file and no separate table stream: the file starts with a File Information Block and everything else follows in the same file. Text is one byte per character. Microsoft has not published a specification of this version.
Structure
The first two bytes are the identifier, 0xA59B in Word 1.x and
0xA5DB in Word 2.0. The bytes at offset 2 are the version: 33 for
Word 1.0 and 45 for Word 2.0 (values seen in files, not an exhaustive list).
FIBthe identifier, lengths and pointers to the tablesto fcMinTextsingle-byte text, one character per byteto fcMacTables and pagesstyles, fonts, property pages in 512-byte unitsrest
See the File Information Block and text and formatting pages. Style sheets are not described here.
Variants
- Word 6.0 and 95 document – single-byte text in one compound file stream
- Word 97–2003 document – Unicode text, with the document’s tables in a separate stream
- Word for Windows 1.x and 2.0 document – a plain file with single-byte text
Links
Software
- LibreOffice Writer – free office suite’s word processor, which imports Word for Windows 2.0 documents (Windows, macOS, Linux)