The DisplayWriter was a dedicated word processing computer released by IBM in 1980. The boot program and storage were on 8-inch floppy disks inserted into a dual-drive external unit. Merge-mail templates could be designed, with all fields designated as a01, a02, a03, etc. Elementary arithmetic could be applied to the fields. A very large central storage and management unit was available.

When PCs appeared, DisplayWrite, a DisplayWriter emulator, was sold to run on them. Documents were stored on the usual 5-1/4 inch floppies with an RFT (revisable format text) or DCA (document content architecture) file extension.

DisplayWrite is still available for the zSeries IBM mainframe computers, albeit in a much more powerful version with full graphics and WYSIWYG support. It is now called DisplayWriter/370. See http://www-306.ibm.com/software/applications/office/dw370/index.html for more details.

See also: word processor