Microsoft Write - The First Word Processor for Windows (also released for Mac and... Atari ST?)
That's right. Microsoft made Write for Mac and Atari ST. Weird, right?
When you think of “Word Processor bundled with Windows”… what springs to mind?
Wordpad? Notepad? How about Word or Works?
Well, in Ye Olden Times (tm), the first word processing software to ship for Microsoft Windows was… Microsoft Write. A simple, very lightweight word processor that (at least in earlier versions) used the .WRI file type (a proprietary file format that contained basic styling information).
Let’s go on a quick tour through every single version of Microsoft Write to ever be released.
1985 - Microsoft Write for Windows 1.0
To start with: That Windows 1.0 interface. Man. I tell ya. Makes my eyes bleed every time I see it.
1987 - Microsoft Write for Macintosh
Microsoft Write for Macintosh was released in 1987… and wasn’t actually Microsoft Write… per se. It was the original version of Microsoft Word… tweaked. And stripped down.
It was, for a time, the “cheap little brother” of Microsoft Word. Didn’t sell great and wasn’t long for this world.
1987 - Microsoft Write for Windows 2.0
Not much changed in the newer version of Write for Windows 2.0. Same menu structure and features.
1988 - Microsoft Write for Atari ST
Now here’s something I bet most people aren’t familiar with! Did you know that the second version of “Microsoft Write” to ever be released… was for the Atari ST?
It’s true! However, it was not based (in any way) on the code base of Write for Windows 1.0. In fact, it was a re-branded (and modified) version of the very first “Microsoft Word” release for the Macintosh!
And, while it was released in 1988.. it was actually originally announced back in 1986. There’s a (not too glowing) review of it in a 1988 issue of Start Magazine that I found highly entertaining.
“Despite its lengthy gestation, Write is a disappointment. It has fewer bugs than WordPerfect, but mostly because it has fewer features. It also takes a non-standard approach to both word processing and the ST, the latter probably due to its Macintosh ancestry. Unofficial but reliable word from Atari sources is that Write will not be updated or enhanced. For better or worse, what we have now is the final version.”
No updates or new versions of Microsoft Write for Atari ST were ever released. It was, essentially, dead on arrival.
1990 - Microsoft Write for Windows 3.0
Once again, very little change to Microsoft Write for Windows in this release. Though there is a new “Help” menu now. So that’s nice.
1992 - Microsoft Write for Windows 3.1
Starting with this version, Write has the same UI but is slightly more powerful… in that it can handle OLE (Object Linking and Embedding).
Microsoft Write for Windows NT 3.51
This is, I believe, the final version of Microsoft Write to ever be released.
It was bundled with Windows NT 3.51 — which, as it happens, is the final version of Windows NT to include the older “Windows 3.x style” program manager.
In future versions of Windows, Microsoft would continue to include a “write.exe” that simply pointed to the new “Wordpad” word process which took its place starting with Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0.
All-in-all, Microsoft Write was a stable, but capable, lightweight word processor. One that served Microsoft Windows users well until it was replaced by Wordpad in the mid 1990s.
The fact that there was an Atari ST version is just an added, and highly amusing, bonus.
