Word 5.5 was incredibly powerful and amazingly stable. I used it to generate 1,000+ page manuals. Word has progressed in many ways but it is generally not better for huge documents than it was then.
I'm thinking this could still be useful as a distraction-free word processor for writers today.
It runs under DOSBox perfectly, saves Word .doc files to the underlying file system (which could well be a Dropbox folder if cloud syncing is needed). Or Google Drive even, which makes it interoperable with Google Docs.
And because it's a completely text-based UI, there's no temptation to mess around with formatting (except maybe bold text).
Bah. I was a very serious and intense user of Word 4.x and 5.0, but 5.5 stripped out its native (and idiosyncratic) interface for a character-mode and hokey version of Windows' CUA menus. I hated it, and stayed on 5.0 until I eventually had to switch to Word for Windows (which, fortunately, eventually became usable).
Cool! This was the absolute acme of word processing software -- it's been downhill ever since. If only it worked on Ubuntu 10.04; linux has gone downhill since then.
Word 5.5, Harvard Project Manager, and Santa Cruz Operation Unix, those were the days. I got stuff done.
I like to install stuff like this in DOS 6.2 Running on a VM on my ibm x3650 M3 with Level 5 RAID, running Server 2012 R2, with an IBM LTO6 Tape Library backup system and Backblaze cloud backup....
http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/...
To install: C:\> Wd55_ben.exe - d
(note the spaces; or just use unzip on Linux)
I just installed it on DOSBox. Works great! (brings back memories of Doogie Howser typing on a blue-screen on his PS/2)