Microsoft Write (which supported RTF) was included in Windows 1.0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Write

For Win95, the new included-in-the-box email client required a text editor which supported multiple fonts, colours, font styles, et al. But Microsoft Write code was not written to be modular and cross-platform (much of the Win95 email client code would also run on the Macintosh, for Mac OS System 7.x).

So the RichEdit windows control was created.

Wordpad.exe is a thin wrapper around the RichEdit control, like Notepad.exe is a thin wrapper around the text edit control.

Notepad.exe have lots of improvement in past 10 years. A major revamp in 2022 It is no longer a "thin wrapper".

I noticed that it needs more than 3 seconds to start on my work laptop. Truly an improvement. /s

Searching in notepad no longer opens a separate window but squeezes the search input in between text lines, and while creating space breaks the display. Searching highlights but doesn't move the cursor, losing the location found when closing search.

It's unusuable now.

On none of my laptops running latest windows does it take 3s… it’s instant…

But how would you create engaging internet content around that.

You probably don't have a slow hard disk

Do laptops ship with slow hard disks now? Doesn’t everything have an nvme?

Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 November.

Microsoft Word for Windows was released in 1989 November, four years after Windows 1.0 included Microsoft Write. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Word

Remember, the DOS MS Word competitor; WordPerfect : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect

And the later WordPerfect for Windows was competition that MS was keen to kill.

Funiest thing is, in win11, the notepad use RichEdit again (but use winui's richedit control, not win32

from https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/richeditd2d-wi...

"The Windows 11 Notepad uses the RichEditD2DPT window class with a recent Microsoft 365 RichEdit."

Seems like there were three options:

1. Ship Word with Windows and not get paid for it, even though they had hundreds of engineers working on it.

2. Ship no word processor with Windows, and make the end user find one on their own.

3. Ship a basic one and let the user upgrade to Word if they needed something more.

At the time with option 2, it's not like you're going to hit google and download some FOSS solution - you would need to go to the computer store and pay $200 for something in a box off the shelf.

I'm thinking option 3 was a good middle ground, and a win-win for MS and the customer.

Microsoft had a cheaper office suite that they sold as a middle ground. I remember the "poor" kids in highschool couldn't edit their papers in certain ways at home and had to do some things on school computers instead.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works

> I remember the "poor" kids in highschool couldn't edit their papers in certain ways at home

The irony was that Microsoft included Microsoft Money in the Works suite, likely to give an aspiration of saving and making enough in order to upgrade to the Office suite.

MS Works was supposed to fill that role...[0]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works [0]

Wordpad was basically just a tech demo for the Rich text control in Windows.

Can you elaborate ? It was a very good RTF editor.