UPDATE, September 5, 2023: Three years later and "I suppose someone out there uses it or Microsoft would have turfed it by now" comes back to haunt me, like a slightly annoying ghost. Microsoft has announced that WordPad is being deprecated and will be removed from Windows in some unspecified future update. Story here: For the first time in 40 years, Windows will ship without built-in word processor
WordPad has been part of Windows since forever, or at least a very long time, and given its name, it seems like it’s been meant for people who need something like Notepad, but fancier, and who are unable or unwilling to buy Microsoft Word (or Office).
I have never been once of those people because I’ve had some version of Word dating back to Word 6.0, which came out in 1993. I’ve only opened WordPad out of curiosity over the years and only opened it today when I saw someone on a forum mention that it’s still included in Windows 10–and it is!
I suppose someone out there uses it or Microsoft would have turfed it by now, like they tried to do with Paint, until they discovered that people actually used Paint or at least had unhealthy, possibly nostalgic attachment to it. I have no such attachment to WordPad, but perhaps I should find its presence reassuring, should I let my subscription lapse and find myself with the urge to draft a letter in Comic Sans.
