EasyWriter

EasyWriter was initially written by John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper while in prison and was published by Information Unlimited Software (IUS). EasyWriter was ported to the IBM PC, but was buggy and difficult to operate. Draper reportedly beat Bill Gates' bid for the lucrative IBM contract, but squandered most of the money. After being persuaded by IBM to develop a new version, IUS offered a free upgrade to version 1.10 to all owners. Despite efforts, the initial release's problems had done permanent damage and destroyed its chance to become the market standard. Later, a seperate application was developed by IUS named "EasyWriter II." EasyWriter II was written in C, unlike the original which was written in Forth; it was marketed as a completely different software due to the differences in code.

EasyWriter had many negative reviews for version 1.0, but had many positive reviews for version 1.10. BYTE claimed in their review that "editing is a pleasure" with both EasyWriter and EasyWriter Professional. Overall, however, it was widely reported that easywriter had serveral bugs, slow performance, user-interface issues, and "a few very annoying inconviences and some very serious traps". While EasyWriter 1.10 resolved a lot of issues, it never fully caught on.