1st Word
word processing software
1st Word is a word processor program for the Atari ST developed by GST Computer Systems and published in 1985. It was given away with all ST systems from December 1985 for the next two years. Although it was relatively well received, it was a very simple program, lacking most power features. It was also very slow when working in large documents. Despite these limitations, its wide availability made the program's .DOC (not Microsoft's .DOC) file format become a de facto standard for the platform and it was widely supported by other programs like desktop publishing systems.
1st Word Plus was a greatly improved version released by GST when the bundling deal ended in 1987. This addressed performance issues and added dozens of features that made it one of the faster and most feature-packed word processors on the platform. Among its more notable additions were a spell checker, mail merge, and support for footnotes and similar long-document editing features. This became one of the best-selling programs on the ST and saw a number of revisions over its lifetime. Plus was later ported to the Acorn Archimedes and IBM PC under GEM as First Word Plus.
The public source identifies “1st Word” as word processing software. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Word, word and processing.
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This entry incorporates text from “1st Word” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.