I couldn’t wait to buy Microsoft Word for Windows — rumored to be the new Cuisinart, Mack truck and Swiss Army knife of word-processing software, full-featured, powerful and, for a writer, the ultimate time-saving device. I was writing a long book, and I wanted the best. One day in January 1990, I finally got to tear open a software box bigger than some computers, and out it came. The world’s pre-eminent software manufacturer had spent roughly as long developing this word processor as the Manhattan Project had spent cooking up the atomic bomb, but secrecy had not been quite as airtight. For more than a year, Microsoft had been leaking juicy tidbits to its waiting army of trade journalists, computer consultants and corporate purchasers. Word for Windows (a.k.a. Winword or WfW) would be Wysiwyg (the standard acronym for What You See Is What You Get) — that is, it would display page layouts and typefaces with high fidelity to the final printed product. It would let users work with nine documents on the screen at …