Word 5.1a and Excel 4 for Mac on Basilisk II

I’ve been using some famous versions of Microsoft apps lately, of the “pre-Office” era: Word 5.1a and Excel 4, which were both running on the Macs available to students at the high school I attended in Geneva around 1993. This article provides the instructions for you to do the same with Basilisk II.

Word 5.1a

Many people claim that Word 5.1a was the best ever version of Microsoft Word, and I wanted to try it out (spoiler alert: it’s superb, indeed.)

Note: this installation process doesn’t work on Basilisk; hence, we use vMac to install Word 5.1a.

1. Follow the steps on last week’s post, “Mini vMac on Fedora” to have a working vMac installation.
2. Download MS Word 5.1a for Mac here (3.5-800k).
3. The 7z file can be expanded on Linux by double-clicking on it.
4. Open vMac.
5. Drop the file Install.img file on the vMac window.
6. Run the installer, adding disks as required.
7. Download the “Old world ROMs” from here.
8. Install Basilisk II if needed: sudo dnf install BasiliskII
9. Open Basilisk and configure as follows:

10. Run Basilisk, it all works now! Caveat: LibreOffice does not read files created with this version of Word, which is a bit of a bummer. Think about saving your work in other more common formats, like “Word for MS-DOS” or “Word for Windows 2.0”, which can be read by LibreOffice.

Access Files inside the Disk Image

Mount the DSK file on your Linux machine to be able to read files inside it:

$ mkdir ~/mountpoint
$ sudo mount -t hfs ~/disk1.dsk ~/mountpoint/

This opens the file in read-only mode. When you’re done:

$ sudo umount -a -t hfs

Excel 4

Excel 4 was a great release, fast and very stable, and with so many functionality built-in, it left the competition well behind. One feature that Excel 4 didn’t include was multiple spreadsheets per file and tabs, which was something that Excel 5 would copy adopt from the now forgotten Borland Quattro Pro, a competitor spreadsheet program that pioneered the feature at the beginning of the 1990s.

Contrary to the installation of Word above, the installation process of Excel 4 doesn’t work on vMac; hence, we use Basilisk in this case.

1. Download files from here.
2. Expand the 7z file.
3. Add all image files to Basilisk.
4. Boot Basilisk and launch installation.
5. It goes very fast, shut down Basilisk.
6. Remove disks, use Excel!

Install the File System Manager

The version of Mac OS downloaded in the previous step does not include the “File System Manager” (or “FSM”) extension. This is required to be able to share a folder on the host machine (Fedora 41 in my case) with the virtual machine, to be able to extract your work from the world of the virtual machine, and eventually to share it with others.

1. Download FSM from here.
2. Expand the ZIP file.
3. Add the DKS file to the Basilisk configuration.
4. Inside Mac OS, copy the extension to the System / Extensions folder.
5. Reboot.

Then, configure Basilisk without the FSM disk, and using any path as “Unix Root”; those files will be visible inside Basilisk.