Collaborative real-time editor
software for several users to edit a file
A collaborative real-time editor is a type of collaborative software or web application which enables real-time collaborative editing, simultaneous editing, or live editing of the same digital document, computer file or cloud-stored data – such as an online spreadsheet, word processing document, database or presentation – at the same time by different users on different computers or mobile devices, with automatic and nearly instantaneous merging of their edits.
Real-time editing performs automatic, periodic, often nearly instantaneous synchronization of edits of all online users as they edit the document on their own device. This is designed to avoid or minimize edit conflicts.
With asynchronous collaborative editing (i.e. non-real-time, delayed or offline), each user must typically manually submit (publish, push or commit), update (refresh, pull, download or sync) and (if any edit conflicts occur) merge their edits. Due to the delayed nature of asynchronous collaborative editing, multiple users can end up editing the same line, word, element, data, row or field resulting in edit conflicts which require manual edit merging or overwriting, requiring the user to choose which edits to use or (depending on the system and setup) automatically overwriting their edits or other people's edits, with or without a warning.
History of key products
The first instance of a collaborative real-time editor was demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart in 1968, in The Mother of All Demos. Widely available implementations of the concept took decades to appear.
A piece of software called Instant Update was released for the classic Mac OS in 1991 from ON Technology. It allowed real-time editing of a single document by multiple users over a LAN and relied on a workgroup server.
The public source identifies “Collaborative real-time editor” as software for several users to edit a file. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Collaborative, real-time and editor.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12313595. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1968 and 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Collaborative real-time editor” 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.