Textpack is a proprietary word processing suite developed specifically for the Displaywriter, that was aimed at automating document creation and finalization.

However, in practice this was undercut by both the Displaywriter hardware being significantly more expensive than competition in the word processing and general microcomputer spaces and the fact that limitations coded into Textpack prevented a fluid upgrade path for customers in many instances.

During the production lifespan of the Displaywriter, Textpack was praised for its functionality and ease of use compared to other word processing options, though the high price tag was criticized, especially in comparison to the IBM 5150 PC and other compatibles.

Additionally, the Displaywriter never received any significant display updates to bring its graphical capabilities up to par with the IBM PC or compatibles.

The established large contracts with government entities, including the Reagan administration and military buoyed the sales slightly until the Displaywriter was soft Textpacks 4 and 6 also offered the ability to combine all program disks into a single DS DD floppy, which could then also be used for document storage if space remained on the disk.

According to IBM, this tiered approach of incorporating multiple levels of operating systems and associated feature programs, was an attempt to make the Displaywriter more economical for smaller businesses, who could choose a cheaper software package and then upgrade as their needs required.

When instructed, the Displaywriter draws from these font sets to generate a working character table in RAM for the operating system to use.

UCSD p-System was the official "data processing" operating system for the Displaywriter, offered by IBM through contract with Softech Microsystems.

Announced in September 1982 and made available in December 1982, as part of the contract, p-System was extensively supported by Softech Microsystems, and had multiple feature upgrades offered from IBM as time went on.

Due to the wide variety of hardware architectures that ran CP/M, most CP/M-86 software has a keyboard and CRT control code configuration menu, where the appropriate information can be entered for the Displaywriter.

CP/M-86 was originally meant to be released under contract, similar to UCSD p-System, but this ultimately fell through, and the operating system was instead offered independently by Digital Research.

The "MS-DOS Loader" written by CompuSystems ignores the Displaywriter's ROM BAT results and does its own hardware assessment when loading the operating system.

The Displaywriter hardware, though in some ways comparable to the IBM 5150, did not use off the shelf components, an open architecture, or third party peripherals.

The physical layout of the system electronics unit, which is the box that the CRT mounts to, consists of a power supply on one half, and cards containing different functions slotted into a backplane with six slots, labeled A-F, that IBM referred to as the system distribution board, on the other half.

The "system card", which is inserted into slot B of the distribution board, contains most of the functions that would be expected on a PC mainboard, including: clock, central processor, ROS ("Read Only Storage", aka ROM), keyboard adapter, interrupt controller and direct memory access controller.

The Displaywriter contained, at the time, extensive self test features that were stored in ROS (ROM) chips on the "system card".

"A basic system — consisting of a display with a typewriter-like keyboard and a logic unit, a printer and a device to record and read diskettes capable of storing more than 100 pages of average text — cost $7,895 and leased for $275 a month.

[2] Unlike some of IBM's other distributed solutions of this era, such as the System/23, 5520 and 5280, which floundered and had limited sales, the Displaywriter was initially a modest success.

Tom Willmott, director of User Programs at International Data Corporation in the early 1980s, estimated that roughly 200,000 units had shipped within the first two years of the Displaywriter going on sale to the public.