EW

Now that I've looked at the two major players on PC, let's take a look at some word processors for other platforms, beginning with the Sharp X68000.

This word processor is identified as "X68000 Word Processor << EW >> Version 1.20O", a 1988 release by EAST Co., Ltd. (which company still exists, by the way).

EW looks quite similar to other word processors from the eighties: simply and ugly, including the (inexplicable!) choice to display hard returns on screen. Its ruler also measures not the size of the text on the page, but the number of columns occupied by the text. Fully 96 (half-width) columns are available.

You interact with the program's extended features by either pressing escape to select from the menu, or pressing control key combinations to access other functions.

EW doesn't have quite the feature set of WordPerfect, but it's much lighter--roughly 900k, of which 388k is the dictionary. Being small may not be sufficient excuse for being ugly and limited, though: if my brief foray into historic Japanese sources (vintage 1989/1990--practically ancient!) doesn't mislead me, EW wasn't a well-regarded piece of software.