It left little memory free after loading, so longer documents had to be stored as separate files of about a page each and printing demanded a long re-formatting process as they were stitched together.

AtariWriter offered most of the features of Word Processor but was much easier to use and shipped on a single 16 kB ROM cartridge that ran across the entire lineup.

The original idea for having two members of the family was to sell the 800 into the professional market, then dominated by CP/M machines and the Apple II, while the 400 was aimed at children, education and gaming.

[1] Very little business software was available at launch, and the machines garnered a reputation, in keeping with Atari's history, as glorified games consoles.

[4] The program ran only on the Atari 800 with 48 kB of RAM and operating system "B" ROMs, which was the vast majority of 800 production.

[5] It also needed at least one disk drive, and to print, the 850 Interface Module along with a suitable Centronics-port based printer like the Atari 825.

Instead of upgrading Atari Word Processor, they hired the author of a well-received 3rd party product and introduced the entirely new AtariWriter.

This meant longer documents had to be split into parts of a page each and the system included functionality that combined the multiple files back together for printing.

"[5] He also praised several less common features, like super and subscript support, double-column layout and compressed and expanded text.

"[13] Jon Loveless, writing in the charter issue of Antic, began his comparison review by calling Atari Word Processor "the most sophisticated and powerful of the three programs being compared".

However, he also wrote that the program "seems very complicated" and that simple operations like printing the document took four levels of menu traversal, while reformatting and paginating took five.