To no one’s surprise, Microsoft is releasing another version of Office. As with the previous version, this one is named after a famous year that hasn’t happened yet, 2010. I call it Office 3.1.

The very first edition of Microsoft Office was 1.0. That was back when computer software was named in a logical, well-intentioned manner.

The first release of any program was 1.0.

If you were a beta tester, which was an actual job back in the early 1980s, then you worked on version 0.whatever. I remember testing a program that started out as version 0.8.1c or something like that. The programmer wanted feedback daily, and I was required to use the program not only as I would in real life, but to test all the features and try to break them. That was a beta test.

Anyway, after version 1.0 came out there were naturally lots of bugs that beta testers never caught. So 1.0 was quickly followed by version 1.1. Or sometimes the next release was something clever, like 1.0.1. Anyway, it was a minor update.

Minor updates were common, and they usually indicated a bug fix or a small feature added.

For example, DOS version 3.0 was quickly followed by DOS 3.1, then 3.2, and finally DOS 3.3. Each new version added some new feature or fixed some obnoxious bug. But the main version number didn’t change, neither did the program name.

When the program received a major update, it’s name didn’t change either: WordPerfect 5.0 was a major release over WordPerfect 4.2, offering a graphical interface that showed italics on the screen (a big deal back then) and other features.

The recent trend, however, is to change a product’s name rather than a release number.

In the beginning, Microsoft Office was two separate programs: Word and Excel. Then everything synced up with what was called Office 6. Before then, both Excel and Word had their own version numbers. I believe Word was on version 3 before it hopped up to version 6.

By the way, at the same time Word hopped up to version 6.0, WordPerfect was on version 6.0. No coincidence there.

My opinion is that Microsoft Office was at version 1.0 back then. The program was pretty much in its infancy. It didn’t get it’s act together until two versions later, the disastrous Office 95.

Microsoft Office 95 was released to coincide with Windows 95. The new version took advantage of Windows 95’s new features, such as longer filenames. But the program really sucked: It was buggy, slow, awkward, and a host of other negative adjectives.

Office 95 was followed by Office 97, which I believe is Microsoft Office 2.0. That was followed by Office 2000, Office 2002, and Office XP (aka Office 2003). I call those versions 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3.

Microsoft Office 2007 changed the whole scheme of things. It’s really Office 3.0. And now you can understand how I believe that Microsoft Office 2010 is really Office 3.1.

Next time I’ll blab about some of the new features in Office 2010, scant though they be.