DisplayWrite was a family of word processors from IBM in the 1980s. They were quite good in many ways, but never made it into the GUI era. DisplayWrite 3, for example, does not even have italics — it really is like a typewriter on a computer.

The default file format on DisplayWrite is a binary format. The default file extension is .TXT, but they are not what we think of as text files (I used to use DW3 as the extension). I have seen the odd request on the web about how to read old DisplayWrite files, so I thought I would document it here.

The trick is to go via WordPerfect 5.1 format, which can be read in by LibreOffice, because of the amazing stability of the WordPerfect file format.

First, download this convert.exe utility that used to come with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS (I have no idea how long the link will remain live):

ftp://ftp.corel.com/pub/WordPerfect/wpdos/5x/convert.exe

https://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/misc/ftp.corel.com/pub/WordPerfect/wpdos/5x/