Microsoft Write

Microsoft Write is a basic word processor that came with Microsoft Windows 1.0x-3.x series. Throughout its lifespan it was minimally updated, and is comparable to early versions of MacWrite. Early versions of Write only worked with Write (.wri) files, but with the modernization of Microsoft Word for Windows in 1989, and the introduction of Windows 3.0 the following year, Write became capable of reading and composing early Word (.doc) documents. With Windows 3.1, Write became OLE capable.

Write is similar to the modern WordPad, which was introduced in Windows 95, and like WordPad, Write was more advanced than Notepad (though Notepad's simplicity is an intentional feature to make basic text operations faster and easier) and was considered a modern word processor. However, Write did not have the many features of software such as Microsoft Word. Despite this, Write had features which its successor WordPad lacks even in the Windows 7 incarnation of WordPad. One such feature is automatic pagination. Another such feature is the ability to format paragraphs in justified mode (where text is aligned to both the left and the right margins).

In Windows 95 and Windows XP onward, Windows Write simply executes WordPad. Virtually all modern applications fail to import .wri files. and at recovering raw text. One exception, not a text editor but a document organizrer tool capable of import and export in many old and new formats like rtf, docx and wri, is Maple from Crystal Office Systems: http://crystaloffice.com/maple/ It allows you to import old .wri files and export all the formatted content as docx, for example.