[throwaway2037]

I am pretty sure that Write for Win3.1 used the Rich Edit control, or an early, non-public pre-cursor.

Here are the Win32 docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/ric...

The more I read about this control, the more I learn about its insane feature set! Microsoft continues to make significant improvements to a version that is only shipped with Microsoft Office -- not available from a barebones Win7/10/11 install. Read more here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/math-in-office/using-richedit...

Rich Edit control also supports the Text Object Model, which is very powerful. Read more here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/tom/nn-t...

[badsectoracula]

Write is actually quite barebones, paragraph and text styling with paragraphs being "images" (Win3.0) or OLE objects (Win3.1, images were OLE objects). Tables, etc were done manually with tabstops.

There is a text file describing the reverse engineered file format here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130831064118/http://msxnet.org...

[throwaway2037]

You are right! I had Write mixed up with Wordpad.

[canucker2016]

RichEdit appeared in Win95. It was written for the Win95 Email app.

The TOM stuff was added later when the MSWord people took over ownership.