WordPad

~ the obituary ~

wordpad was on every windows install i ever set up between 1998 and 2020. it sat in start menu, accessories, between calculator and paint, a yellow notepad icon next to a pencil. i opened it by accident usually, looking for word, and most of the time i just closed it and went back to find word proper. wordpad was the thing between notepad and word. it had bold and italic but no spellcheck, and it was the rtf file viewer that nobody chose voluntarily once microsoft office existed in the household.

microsoft shipped it with windows 95 on 24 august 1995 as a replacement for microsoft write, the equivalent that had been bundled with windows 3.1. it shipped supporting rtf and word 6 doc files. by windows 7 it could read docx and odt as well, and by windows vista it had dropped legacy doc support for security reasons. for 29 years it sat in the same start menu slot.

in september 2023 microsoft announced wordpad would be removed. windows 11 build 26020 from january 2024 was the first to ship without it. windows 11 24h2 went general availability on 1 october 2024, and that was the cleanly-dead anchor. microsoft recommended word for rich text and notepad for plain. nothing replaced wordpad as a default rtf viewer, and windows just stopped having one.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was for ~

mostly opening rtf files that arrived as email attachments. or accidentally double-clicking the wrong icon when you wanted word. the other common use was reading the readme.rtf that came with a downloaded game or shareware in the late 1990s, when nobody knew which word processor a user had installed so the default ship format was rtf. wordpad opened readmes without launching the heavier office stack. it was the windows equivalent of textedit on the mac, in a hierarchy where notepad sat below it and word sat far above.

~ the inheritance ~

wordpad was the one piece of windows that did not survive windows 11 24h2. paint and notepad both still ship in current windows, and calculator is still there too. wordpad was the only accessory of that cohort to get cut. the cohort dated back to windows 3.0, and wordpad itself was a 29-year run from 1995 to 2024.

microsoft's stated reason was that the application no longer made sense given free alternatives. word is available as a free web app, office is available through outlook account login, and notepad covers plain text. the rtf-without-word slot wordpad once filled became a non-slot.

~ the funny part ~

wordpad existed for 29 years specifically so windows users could open word files without having word installed. in 1995 that was a real product gap. by 2024 every windows machine that shipped already had access to a free copy of word through the office on the web or the office app login, and the gap had closed. wordpad survived a full decade past the moment it stopped being needed. then microsoft removed it in a quarterly windows update.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »