WAdobe FrameMaker is a document processor designed for writing and editing large or complex documents, including structured documents. It was originally developed by Frame Technology Corporation, which was bought by Adobe.
WBoids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds. His paper on this topic was published in 1987 in the proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference. The name "boid" corresponds to a shortened version of "bird-oid object", which refers to a bird-like object. Incidentally, "boid" is also a New York Metropolitan dialect pronunciation for "bird."
WChiWriter is a commercial scientific text editor for MS-DOS, created by Cay Horstmann in 1986. It was one of the first WYSIWYG editors that could write mathematical formulas, even on IBM PC XT computers that were then common.
WVentura Publisher was the first popular desktop publishing package for IBM PC compatible computers running the GEM extension to the DOS operating system. The software was originally developed by Ventura Software, a small software company founded by John Meyer, Don Heiskell, and Lee Jay Lorenzen, all of whom met while working at Digital Research. It ran under an included run-time copy of Digital Research's GEM.
WDeluxe Music Construction Set (DMCS) is a 1986 music composition, notation and playback program for the Amiga and Macintosh. The program was originally released as Will Harvey's Music Construction Set for the Apple II and other computers, but was redesigned for the deluxe version. DMCS was created by Geoff Brown and published by Electronic Arts (EA). Ariolasoft published the program in Europe under license from EA.
WDISLIN is a high-level plotting library developed by Helmut Michels at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany. Helmut Michels currently works as a mathematician and Unix system manager at the computer center of the institute.
WFontographer (FOG) is a font editor for Windows and OS X; it is used to create digital fonts. It was originally developed by Altsys but is now owned by FontLab Ltd.
WgeoPublish is a desktop publishing program designed by Berkeley Softworks for the GEOS environment.
WGEOS is a discontinued operating system from Berkeley Softworks. Originally designed for the Commodore 64 with its version being released in 1986, enhanced versions of GEOS later became available in 1987 for the Commodore 128 and in 1988 for the Apple II family of computers. A lesser-known version was also released for the Commodore Plus/4.
WGroupWise is a messaging and collaboration platform from Micro Focus that supports email, calendaring, personal information management, instant messaging, and document management. The GroupWise platform consists of desktop client software, which is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and the server software, which is supported on Windows Server and Linux.
WMini Office II, published by Database Software in 1986, was an office suite available for several home computers, among which were the Amstrad CPC, the Atari 8-bit family, the BBC Micro, the Commodore 64, and others. The software package could be purchased on cassette tape or floppy disk. Mini Office II was originally written for the BBC Micro Computer and was also available in EPROM format.
WMS-DOS 4.0 was a multitasking release of MS-DOS developed by Microsoft based on MS-DOS 2.0. Lack of interest from OEMs, particularly IBM, led to it being released only in a scaled-back form. It is sometimes referred to as European MS-DOS 4.0, as it was primarily used there. It should not be confused with PC DOS 4.00 or MS-DOS 4.01 and later, which did not contain the multi-tasking features.
WNorton Commander (NC) is a discontinued prototypical orthodox file manager (OFM), written by John Socha and released by Peter Norton Computing. NC provides a text-based user interface for managing files on top of MS-DOS. It was officially produced between 1986 and 1998. The last MS-DOS version of Norton Commander, 5.51, was released on July 1, 1998.
WPageStream is a desktop publishing software package by Grasshopper LLC, currently available for a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Amiga. The software was originally released under the name Publishing Partner for the Atari ST in 1986.
WPC Tools is a collection of software utilities for DOS developed by Central Point Software.
WProfessional Adventure Writer or PAW is a program that allows the user to write textual adventure games with graphic illustrations. It was written by Tim Gilberts, Graeme Yeandle and Phil Wade, based on Yeandle's earlier system called The Quill. PAW was published by Gilsoft in 1987 and quickly gained a loyal following. PAW improved over The Quill in several ways. In particular, its textual input parser was more sophisticated, meaning inputs were no longer confined to the two-word telegraphic verb noun style. PAW also supported NPCs, different character sets, and full use of the memory of the 128K ZX Spectrum. However, unlike their prequel The Quill, the PAW no longer supported other computer systems like the BBC Micro or the Commodore 64. Over 400 games were written using PAW.
WSuperPaint is a graphics program capable of both bitmap painting and vector drawing. SuperPaint was one of the first programs of its kind, combining the features of MacPaint and MacDraw whilst adding many new features of its own.
WTheDraw is a text editor for MS-DOS to create ANSI and animations as well as ASCII art. The editor is especially useful to create or modify files in ANSI format and text documents, which use the graphical characters of the IBM ASCII code pages, because they are not supported by Microsoft Windows anymore. The first version of the editor was developed in 1986 by Ian E. Davis of TheSoft Programming Services. The last public version of the editor was version 4.63, which was released in October 1993.
WVP-Info is a database language and compiler for the personal computer. VP-Info was a competitor to the Clipper and dBase applications in the late 1980s and 1990s. VP-Info runs on MS-DOS, DR-DOS and the PC-MOS/386 operating system. The last release of VP-Info was named Shark.
WWorld Builder is a game creation system for point-and-click adventure games. It was released in 1986 by Silicon Beach Software and had already been used for creating Enchanted Scepters in 1984. In 1994, World Builder along with Course Builder, SuperCard, and HyperDA was cited as the reason Appleton was "something of a legend". On August 7, 1995 developer William C. Appleton released World Builder as freeware.