IBM DisplayWrite

Display Write, in the German-speaking PC text, first published in 1980, is a family of word processing software manufacturer IBM.

For text processing systems, mini and mainframe

Display Write first ran on the IBM 6580 Display Writer ( in German speaking countries: Writing System ) - one from 1980 to 1986, distributed text processing system that should be the successor of the electric typewriters. In the late 1980s a program version called DisplayWrite/36 for the IBM System/36 minicomputer type was still available. Today, the program is supported only in the form of WYSIWYG word processing DisplayWrite/370 ( in German speaking / 370Text ) on System/370-Großrechnern.

In order to offer the display Write- text editor family on all products sold by IBM operating systems, the latter version was developed in the 1980s. She possessed many modern features that appear naturally for today's word processors, for example, word wrap, different fonts, page formatting, headers and footers, spell checking, automatic word division at the end of line, etc. A special feature and caveat though is the only one of it supported input device, the terminal 3270, which provides the software no control over the keys pressed.

For personal computer

Write or PC display text, the name on the German market, is the version for PC DOS and OS / 2 While version 2 from the year 1984 only rudimentary functions ( including but already a spelling correction program ) had contained the operated with the mouse version 4 of 1987, among other functions for form letters or advanced text rendering options, but still no WYSIWYG. The documents created with the program used as a file name extension, the abbreviation " DOC " ( not to be confused with the Microsoft Word format). For mainframe texts can both standard formats on IBM mainframes, exported to the RFT ( Revisable - form text) or in the DCA format (Document Content Architecture ).

After having 4 or IBM PC display Write text 4 in 1987, the first version of this program had come for the new PS/2-Computer with the operating system OS / 2 on the market, appeared in December 1990 with version 5, the latest edition of Classical DOS.