AtariWriter

Atari's original marketing plan for the 8-bit machines was to sell the 400 into educational settings and for games, and the 800 into small-office settings where CP/M and the Apple II were successful. Unfortunately, the lack of useful business software hindered any sales into the office market, and the machine quickly garnered a reputation as a glorified games box.[2]

In 1980, Atari decided to attack this problem by introducing their own word processor, the inventively named Atari Word Processor. This shipped on a copy protected floppy disk and required 48 kB of RAM, meaning that the user had to have a fully-expanded 800 and the Atari 810 disk drive at a minimum. The machines lacked a parallel port and Atari did not sell any printers with the SIO adaptor built-in, so actually printing the results required the Atari 850 interface and a parallel printer like the Atari 825 or the widely recommended Epson MX-80.[3]

While the program was feature-packed, including support for things like two-column layout and super- and sub-scripting, reviewers all pointed out that it was very difficult to use. In addition to an extensive set of editing commands using control keys, including cursor commands that did not use the system's own cursor keys, more complex operations like loading documents or printing required trips through multi-level text menus. As these were essentially impossible to remember, a quick-reference sheet was included and the documentation was designed to stand up on a desk for continual use.[3]

Word Processor was not the only word processor in the early days of the platform. Reviews from 1982 generally also considered Text Wizard from Datasoft and Letter Perfect from LKJ. Both of these programs were much simpler in terms of features, but could run on any machine in the lineup and were far easier to use. These easily outsold Atari's program for both of these reasons, and Text Wizard was often considered the best-buy, and Letter Perfect the best overall. Atari's was never recommended.[3]

Sometime in late 1981, Gary Furr left his job at GTE where he wrote specifications for applications software for government contractors. Moving to Atari, Furr and product manager Peggy Allen soon began planning to replace Word Processor. Instead of modifying Word Processor, they decided to abandon it entirely. Ironically, Furr wrote the design specification in March or April 1982 using Word Processor.[4]

A month or two later, they found that there were not enough programmers available in the company to write the program they specified.[5] Instead, they hired the author of Text Wizard, 15-year-old William Robinson, to modify that program to run in a ROM cartridge.[lower-alpha 1] Robinson had written Text Wizard for the LA-based software company Datasoft, and it had garnered good reviews while running in very little RAM.[7]

At the time, bank switching cartridges were not common, but the Atari machines had always included the little-used ability to include up to 16 kB in a single cart. This would allow it to run on any machine in the lineup, even early-model 400's and the later 600XL which came with only 16 kB of RAM. It also meant there was no requirement for a floppy disk, and documents could be saved even to the Atari 410 cassette drive if need be.[8] A huge advantage over Word Processor was that the program did not load into RAM and thus left much more memory free; on an 800, Word Processor had only about 10 kB free, enough for about one page of text, but AtariWriter had roughly 20 kB free even with DOS loaded, allowing small documents up to about six pages to be held entirely in memory.[8]

Programming took place during the summer of 1982 and internal testing took place during the fall of 1982 and into early 1983.[9] Final testing and documentation was largely complete by the February/March time-frame, when a status meeting of the entire Home Computer division was called. Furr described how they handled printers, the program would load a single printer driver at a time, with all four Atari printers supported and others available on disk. The manager refused to support non-Atari printers, and Furr had to call Robinson and tell him to remove the extra drivers. Instead, the manual added a short section stating additional drivers would be available from the Atari Program Exchange (APX).[10]

AtariWriter 1.0 was released to production in the spring of 1983. Furr left Atari shortly thereafter and took a position with Datasoft.[11] Three additional minor upgrades were released over the next year, culminating in Version C. The program was an enormous success, becoming one of Atari's best-selling products of all time. Furr was later told that the original cartridge version had sold approximately 800,000 copies. This did not include any foreign language versions, French, Spanish, German and Italian, or the later versions like Plus and 80.[12] Given about 4 million machines sold in total,[13] this represents a significant portion of the entire Atari fleet.

The decision to only support Atari printers was a terrible one, one that every product review harped on.[14] Furr began writing drivers on his own at home, and a selection of 10 to 11 of these first appeared in the Fall 1983 APX catalog.[15] When APX folded in 1984, Furr took over and began direct sales from his home.[16] Furr found these were being purchased by users' groups who would then give them out to the members. He nevertheless sold 25,000 copies between 1983 and 1993 directly, not including the additional sales through APX. The last copy was sold in 1993.[17] Several years later, Furr was contacted by a user group in Pennsylvania, leading to him shipping all the disks with source code to the group.[18] Through this period the number of drivers expanded from the original 10 to as many as 159 by the time he sent the code off.[19]

After the purchase of Atari by Jack Tramiel in 1984, the new Atari Corporation began an effort to introduce cost-reduced versions of the 8-bit lineup, the XE series. Among these was the 130XE model, which used bank switching to support 128 kB of RAM. For these machines, a new version of AtariWriter was introduced in November 1985, AtariWriter Plus.[20] By this time, Robinson had left Datasoft and started his own company, Micro Fantasy. Robinson continued to be the primary programmer on the core program, while Ron Rosen handled the mail merge, and R. Stanley Kistler the spell checker. Jeffrey Bass wrote the documentation.[21]

The new version added a huge number of features, giving it parity with the original Atari Word Processor in terms of power. Practically every part of the program changed in some way. Adding all of this functionality meant it no longer fit on a 16 kB cartridge, and it instead shipped on two flippy disks, one of them with the "normal" version on one side and the 130XE version on the other. In contrast to the original, which booted in less than a second, loading the new version from disk took almost a minute.[20]

The main difference compared to the original version was support for horizontal scrolling to allow direct editing of wider documents. This had been one of the notable features of the original Atari Word Processor, which used the platform's hardware assisted scrolling system to rapidly move the entire document horizontally to allow editing at up to 132 columns. The new AtariWriter worked in the same way, but expanded it even further to a maximum of 249 columns. Another change was that formatting options were set through a global menu, rather than on-screen within the document. A new save-as-plain-ASCII option allowed these codes to be easily stripped out for sending the plain text to other users. Another major feature taken from Word Processor was two-column layout.[20] Dozens of other more minor changes were also included that made common operations much easier.[22]

The new version also greatly expanded printer support. In addition to the original set of Atari printers and the ones added later like the XMM 801 dot-matrix printer and XDM 121 daisy wheel printer, selecting "other" showed drivers for the Epson FX-80, MicroPrism 480 and Juki 6100. This menu had another "other" selection which allowed you to load a driver from disk. The manual included an entire section on how to create your own printer driver, although the ones from the original APX disks continued to work.[20]

Other new options were available as load-on-demand subprograms which were included on the program disk. Most notable was Atari Proofreader, a spell checker with 36,000 word library that took up both sides of the second disk. Selecting Verify Spelling from the main menu exited AtarWriter and ran Proofreader, which then loaded a selected document and continued. Another was the Mail Merge option, which worked in a similar fashion and could merge with up to 255 records of up to 15 fields stored in a second file. Because these were all disk based, they were quite slow; a 3,000 word document took about 15 minutes to spell check.[20]

One downside to the new program was that it left only 12 kB free on an original 48 kB machine, only slightly more than the 10 kB of the original Word Processor. On the 130XE, running the custom version, 47,616 bytes were available. This was arranged as three banks of 15,872, but the program attempted to make this invisible by loading and saving all three from a single file. However, during editing one had to manually jump from bank to bank using a function key.[20]

After years of complaints that the platform did not have any official 80-column support, in 1989 Atari released the XEP80, a plug-in display module that connected one of the Atari joystick ports to a composite monitor. Any program wishing to use this option had to be re-written to support the new mode, which was entirely unrelated to the built-in display hardware. Atari used AtariWriter Plus to produce AtariWriter 80, which was otherwise identical. The only major change was that the column display in the editor, formerly along the bottom of the screen, was now repositioned to the top. The XEP communicated in serial, so some delays are seen when the complete screen is redrawn, like when switching to the menu and back to the document, but the system is otherwise similar to Plus.[23] The program was apparently completed in November 1987, but for unknown reasons was not released until well into the late summer of 1988.[24]

Another of the Tramiel family's goals after taking over Atari was to introduce an entirely new GUI-based computer, which emerged as the Atari ST in the summer of 1985. Concerned about the same issue that caused the Atari 800 to be seen dismissively, they had programmer Dan Oliver port the existing assembly language AtariWriter screen editor code to the ST while John Feagans converted the layout and formatting handlers to the C programming language. In two weeks, a version of AtariWriter Plus was up and running as ST Writer.[25]

Running on the new machine gave the program many advantages. Memory was no longer limited, and the program was capable of handling very large documents. It also had a natural 80-column display, and was extremely fast. The program was so similar to the original it could exchange files with no edits.[25]

As useful as the program was, it was not GUI-based, and was released for free while Atari began the search for a GUI program to replace it. Several GUI word processors soon emerged, some by the end on 1985, and ST Writer development at Atari ended. By this time it had garnered a major following of its own, and the replacements were seen as second rate in comparison. The company eventually allowed avid user Bruce Noonan to take over development. He continued releasing the product through a number of major versions, even adding a limited GUI for menu access,[26] with the last releases well into the 1990s.

• Furr, Gary (29 August 2016). "Gary Furr, AtariWriter Product Manager, Printer Drivers" (Interview). Interviewed by Kevin Savitz.
• Kushner, Richard (May 1983). "The New AtariWriter Word Processor". Analog. pp. 108–111.
• Leyenberger, Arthur (October 1983). "AtariWriter: an almost complete word processor". Creative Computing. pp. 92–93.
• Dunn, Mike (May 1983). "AtariWriter". Antic. p. 83.
• Mace, Scott (14 November 1983). "AtariWriter". InfoWorld. pp. 64–67.
• Loveless, Jon (April 1982). "Word Processors for the Atari: A Comparison". Antic. pp. 4–5, 34.
• Halfhill, Tom (May 1986). "AtariWriter Plus". Compute!. pp. 56–60.
• Hoglin, Carolyn (November 1991). "Carolyn's Corner: AtariWriter Plus". Mid-Florida Atari Computer Club.
• Ratcliff, Matthew (December 1989). "AtariWriter 80". Antic. pp. 23–24.
• "8-Bit News: AtariWriter 80 Rounds the Finish Line". Analog. August 1988.
• Noonan, Bruce (Winter 1986). "ST Writer Secrets, Word Processing Power Explored". START. pp. 86–92.