Tedium - Good Luck Opening These 📝

Today in Tedium: As you may or may not know about me, I have strong opinions on how word processors and text editors should work. I also have a fascination with failed (or at least, declining) file formats—and having written a couple of these lists, I’ve found them to be deeply enjoyable as well as a great way to highlight forgotten software that people probably haven’t used in a long time. (Some would argue they’re trolling opportunities, to which I plead the fifth.) So perhaps it’s time to combine those two things into a list that highlights some word processors that time forgot, or that most of us moved on from. But I of course need to hedge this slightly, by pointing out that when I decide on what shows up in this list, I work within basic parameters: it tends to be specialized, obfuscated, uncommon, or unloved—in a combination that, together makes it optional for the average person. Let’s dig into some documents that might be hard to open with a standard word processor. — Ernie @ Tedium

Today’s GIF comes from a video by the YouTube creator RetroCAD, showing off the forgotten word processor Professional Write, also known as PFS:Write.

A video of someone booting up the Apple II version of AppleWorks.

3. AppleWorks/ClarisWorks file formats

File type: Text-based (later WYSIWYG) word processor, part of larger office suite, not cross-compatible

Most common file extension: .AWP/.CWK

Despite the name, this is a complicated mess of a file format, because if you break it down, you’re really talking about three separate pieces of software that were barely compatible and sold under two wildly different names. (I guess the quadrant system wasn’t in effect for Apple’s word processor ambitions.)

This application suite, which originally began as an Apple II program in 1984 (and, fun fact, was my first exposure to a word processor in 1991, when I was in the fourth grade), eventually was brought over to the Apple IIgs starting in 1988 under a different code base. But complicating factors is ClarisWorks, a MacOS app first developed in the early 1990s, that itself was eventually renamed AppleWorks. That application saw a single major version released for Mac OS X before it was finally retired by Apple in the mid-2000s.

Per the Archive Team, It was technically possible to convert an Apple II AppleWorks file to a Mac AppleWorks file … but only if you had an Apple IIgs to bridge the gap, which could read the former and share a saved file that was compatible with the latter.

Despite not being sold since 2007, some desperate types have taken extreme steps to be able to still run this software—including running virtual machines on Intel or compatibility layers with Windows versions of AppleWorks.

In the modern day, LibreOffice is able to read Mac-based AppleWorks files—something that Apple’s own successor software, including Pages, dropped a decade ago.

The GeoWorks Ensemble (PC) version of GeoWrite. There was also a Commodore 64 version that wasn’t compatible with it. (via Guidebook Gallery)

6. GeoWrite formats

File type: WYSIWYG word processor document for C64 and DOS, not cross-compatible

Most common file extension: .CVT, .000

As you probably know, I’m a bit of a GeoWorks superfan, and a big element of this is the fact that its included software was significantly more capable than its Windows equivalents.

This is in part because of the software’s roots, which started as GEOS on the Commodore 64—where the company’s software suites, including GeoWrite, first began.

GeoWrite had some fairly advanced capabilities from a graphical standpoint, including the ability to display text in columns and add visual elements, such as borders, to pages. And these capabilities were all the more impressive on the hardware-bottlenecked C64. (As far as I can tell, the C64 geoWrite, with a lowercase g, is not directly compatible with the later DOS GeoWrite.)

A 1991 review of the DOS version of GeoWorks Ensemble, in the magazine Compute! noted that GeoWrite was perhaps one of the best parts of GeoWorks, but was held back by under-the hood capabilities.

“Well, it’s not what GeoWrite includes that’s the problem; it’s what it’s missing: macros, search-and-replace capability, a thesaurus, and a spelling checker,” reviewer Howard Millman wrote. “When compared to the advanced bells and whistles GeoWrite offers, these missing features are as basic as toast for breakfast.”

Much work has been done to make C64 versions of GEOS documents compatible with modern software, much of which is highlighted on the site Pagetable; the path for the DOS version is slightly easier, as GeoWrite files can be converted to HTML or RTF files in later iterations of the operating system (though admittedly, when I tried to test this in DOSBox, FREEGEOS crashed).

From these simple roots, an important program was born. (via LibreOffice)

9. StarOffice Writer format

File type: WYSIWYG word processor that later gained open-source superpowers

Most common file extension: .SDW, .SXW

While the open-source office software game is strong these days, thanks to the modern-day LibreOffice suite, but that suite had to come from somewhere, and that starting point was the StarOffice suite, which dated way back to the 1980s as a DOS application.

A fateful decision by Sun Microsystems to buy the suite for its own company (rather than pay Microsoft licenses for Office), then offer a freely available version of the application, created a lane for the tool to survive into the modern day, first as StarOffice, then as the open-sourced OpenOffice.org. When Oracle bought Sun in the early 2010s, the company shut down StarOffice and gave OpenOffice.org to the Apache Foundation to manage, leaving LibreOffice to carry the reins.

StarOffice Writer format, while uncommon today, is basically the connecting thread between the application’s early proprietary roots and the mature modern free and open source alternative to Microsoft Word we have today.