Abstract In recent years interactive data analysis and presentation packages have become more and more attractive on conventional timesharing systems. The advent of personal workstations with their good response time and powerful graphics capabilities is making these systems even more popular. PAW has been designed in that spirit. It combines the best features and the experience acquired with the existing systems together with the user friendliness now possible on modern workstations. Rather than being a monolithic system, which may be well suited to one operating system, PAW is built with modules which can also be used in the batch environment or by other interactive programs. PAW has been designed to work on many different configurations.