PC-Write
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PC-Write was a computer text processor and was one of the first three widely popular software products sold via the marketing method that became known as shareware. It was originally written by Bob Wallace, in early 1983.
PC-Write was a modeless editor, using control characters and special function keys to perform various editing operations. It could produce plain ASCII text files, but there were also features that embedded control characters in a document to support automatic section renumbering, bold and italic fonts, and other such. Lines beginning with particular control characters and/or a period (.) contained commands that were evaluated when the document was printed, e.g. to specify margin sizes, select elite or pica type, or to specify the number of lines of text that would fit on a page.
A configuration file allowed customization of the program, including remapping the keyboard.
Later versions of the registered (paid for) version of PC-Write included a thesaurus (which was not shareware) in addition to the editor itself. Utilities were also provided to convert PC-Write files to and from other file formats that were popular at the time.
The manuals provided to registered users by the editor's maker, Quicksoft, were notable for the numerous pictures of cats gracing their pages.
When the market changed to multi-program software incorporating a word processor, spreadsheet, and data base programs, Quicksoft went out of business in 1993.
