WordStar for the go! FTW!

ChiWriter. That is all.

Is ChiWriter still alive?

I wrote my final year project in ChiWriter, on an Acorn Archimedes running a dos emulator.

It was really a pleasure it use. Excellent tutorial for beginners.

I was always surprised that it never appeared in my "working" life.

since it also supports the reading and writing of Microsoft Word documents.

Well, yes and no.

Yeas, it has the same keen pricepoint.

No, it is not as lean as WordPad (which can do the most basic things only). Loading time is quite a bit longer, especially on not-that-new hardware, and it times it can feel a bit sluggish (depending on document size - but these programs are just not fit for longer documents, I very much prefer LaTeX, but let's not start that discussion).

No, LibreOffice does not open the newest docx-format-files in all cases without issues. Formatting gets f'd up - but then opening the same file on different Word installs (even within the same company, centrally maintained installs, same central print server, etc.) has similar effects (don't know about WordPad, when using .rtf, as it does not save to .docx).

LibreOffice has more features, but (actually, in my opinion, like Word) too many possibilities for most people - and offers the wrong options too openly, which leads to people not writing properly formatted documents (don't get me started...).

I actually do use LO on my personal machines, it is not bad. But it occupies a differnet niche than WP.

Word had a long history of not opening documents written by later versions, no doubt a means of putting their customers on the update treadmill. Old habits die hard.

In the meantime someone who, for whatever reason, has accumulated a stack of .rtf documents, or may has some application that produces reports in .rtf form and doesn't wish to be dragged into Microsoft's online world, will be able to open them with LibreOffice.

"Yeas, it has the same keen pricepoint.... No, it is not as lean as WordPad"

Anyone looking for a lean text editor with the same keen pricepoint of $0 need look no further than Notepad++

Anyone looking for a full-fat word processor (not to mention full office suite) with both Universal-format and Microsoft-format compatibility need look no further than LibreOffice

A number of reasons I use it (& I have suggested it to users in the past wanting a simple WP), the main one being Word365 takes longer than ever to load & thanks to work requirements I get nagged into saving it to one of 4 groupings (Which work has failed to apply the mandatory file grouping meta data).

For a quick rattled off simple doc its a quicker option for me & can be saved\printed as a PDF.

I wonder if we can have Microsoft Write back then.

Since all those old CDs I have still have readme.rtf files...

I'll miss it as well.

One thing I used it for was a scratch pad to record progress of a piece of work, as I could cut and paste text and screenshots as I went through a procedure. It also handled UNIX type text files (single LF rather than LF CR pairs) better than anything else Microsoft provided.

I appreciated the very fact that it was a basic text editor with image capability which I could trust was on every Windows system that my my clients required me to use in their environments.

When you have an air-gapped environment with no access to the Internet (as most environments that I have worked on in the last 20 years have been), which have not all had Microsoft Office installed, it was a trusted tool that never let me down for what I used it for.

MS could have added markdown to WordPad instead of pulling the plug.

Or marked down the price, and paid us to use it?

I made the jump from Windows 3.11 to Windows 98, and WordPad blew my mind. Why? Well do you remember having to do anything in Write?

I'll be sad to see it go, but no doubt some bright spark with time on their hands will made an opensource tribute to it.

Isn't it already open source? I read that it used to be distributed as sample code with Windows SDKs.

Wait, found it: https://github.com/microsoft/VCSamples/tree/master/VC2010Samples/MFC/Visual%20C%2B%2B%202008%20Feature%20Pack/WordPad. Pre-ribbon and everything!

I've gradually moved off Wordpad to Notepad++. My use case is more WordStar than MS Word 3.0 (which is RTF), most of my actual .DOC requirements are met by Word '97. and I mostly manage to avoid zipped XML files. I was mostly using Wordpad for text documents that didn't work in Notepad.

I'll miss it. I've found it useful in the past when working on locked-down machines (and something like Notepad++ isn't possible) for processing files that are large enough for Notepad to throw a fit over

Similar story here, although it was mostly for opening text files with UNIX line endings. Notepad couldn't do that until recent versions of Windows.

It will show a unix text file with line feeds correctly, whereas notepad shows a useless single line (that may not be the case in recent versions but I'm talking about the ancient stuff that lives on our "production" machines, computers that came wired up to expensive tools & equipment which is still n 27/7 use and can't be replaced without risk)

That's about the only reason it's being used here, but beware, it might decide to write a funny invisible first byte to designate a character set, an evil Windows hack that has buggered up automated workflows here in a not immediately obvious way.

I have met people who swear by it as the "Word Processor that does all I ever need", and that's a fair point really. Not that these will likely upgrade from W7 or W2k or whatever they're using

I prepare documents in Word. But sometimes, when distributing my files to friends, I run them through Wordpad to reduce their size (typically from 15KB to 4KB), and to remove the serial number of my copy of MS Office.

Quote: "...But at the very keen price of $0.00..."

As I recall, I've bought around eight Windows machines (workstations and laptops) since around 1991. No one asked me to pay for Windows, but each and every time, the manufacturer of the machine paid around $100 OF MY MONEY to Microsoft on my behalf.

It's actualy worse than that. Since around the year 2000, my first step after buying a new retail machine (and sending $100 to Microsoft....no choice!)....yup....my first step has been to do a bare metal install of Linux.

Simon Sharwood is being "economical with the truth".............Winpad was never "free".......

I rather doubt if the big manufacturers are paying anything like $100 per Windows license.

We used to buy PCs for the office, and reinstalled them with Unix. It was a point of principle to always reclaim the Windows licence fee from Microsoft.

And gradually, bit by bit, Microsoft turn a once-useful OS into a cloud-only system with web-browsing capabilities by removing functionality, on little app at a time.

How long before File Explorer is deprecated ("we don't need local file management because you can do it online with onedrive and sharepoint") or notepad (same reason, and you can use word anyway). Then there's the calculator (you can do calculations with Bing's AI thingy) and the ability to run office apps at all. It'll end up like ChromeOS, totally unable to function without an internet connection.

And according to some people Windows is totally incapable of working with an Internet connection...

It's already the case that W11 refuses to install without a live internet connection (all versions, so far as I'm aware). The home version also seems to now insist on a Microsoft account when setting it up. Pro version still allows local accounts, but they don't make it at all obvious.

I would have thought wordpad was pretty much "done" and pretty much in feature freeze for the last decade.

Since wordpad only reads the newer docx formats I would have thought a plugin architecture to convert whatever to wordpad's internal format (rtf?) would leave the wordpad executable itself alone?

Years ago I would use wordpad on my wife's win9x PC which had an attached printer to write a quick business (paper) letter. Notepad.exe and wordpad.exe seemed to be the only sane tools on a Windows PC (from the corp. that gave us edlin.com :). The dos shareware PCwrite even earlier was not too bad for the same use.

" The software giant hasn't explained the decision to wipe WordPad "

But they did recommend paying them more money. Which I think says it all.

WordPad is definitely a simpler tool that reflects a somewhat simpler time.

The history of operating systems/environments was, for a long time, one of constant feature creep

I remember the days when it was exciting that DOS was getting an undelete feature... and looking back, it has never been a good long-term strategy for a company to sell software that "fixes" deficits in any operating system. There was once a time when having something like Norton Utilities/PC Tools was essential for any serious user, but most of the functionality in them has either become part of the OS or been made irrelevant by improvements in software or hardware.

WordPad reflects a specific point of time in the development or personal computing. It had just enough features to be worthy of replacing Windows 3.x's Write, but not enough to compete seriously with Word. It was there purely so that Microsoft could check a box in comparison tables when going up against OS/2, GEM or the Mac. "We also have a basic document editor. And a scientific calculator. And a paint program."

It's a shame to see it go, but I can't claim I've used it even once in the past decade. Are we now entering a period where the constant feature creep will be replaced by trimming? ChromeOS would seem to indicate that, but it's actually very much an outlier. I suspect that this is simply more an attempt to reduce the maintenance burden and attack footprint for Microsoft's development teams.

As such, I think WordPad currently tells us more about the industry's history and future than it offers in actual functionality.