Microsoft FrontPage 1.0

Microsoft FrontPage is a WYSIWYG HTML editor/Cuisinart for Microsoft Windows.

FrontPage was supposed to enable developers to create web pages graphically, without manually messing around with markup code. Really, you would not try to write a Microsoft Word document in binary would you? By the mid 1990s, few word processors still exposed internal formatting codes or markup, and those that did were viewed as relics of the 1970s mainframe/terminal era. So why should HTML documents be any different?

Unfortunately, as Microsoft enhanced the product they made FrontPage documents render incorrectly in browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer. The intention was to create browser lock-in. The actual result: FrontPage became a laughing stock, gave WYSIWYG HTML editors a bad name in general, and web developers went back to developing using sticks, stones, VT100 terminals, and Microsoft Notepad.

For the most part, FrontPage was Windows-only. There was a single Macintosh version released in 1998. FrontPage was discontinued after 2003.

Screenshots

Release notes

This is the first version of FrontPage, from just before VTI was bought by Microsoft.

Installation instructions

This version is for Windows 3.1 with Win32s and Windows NT.

It includes a personal web server.