WriteNow was one of the two original word processor applications developed for the launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, and the primary word processor for NeXT computers.
WriteNow was written for Apple Computer, Inc. by John Anderson and Bill Tschumy in Seattle, separate from the Macintosh computer and MacWrite word processor development teams. Steve Jobs was concerned that those programming MacWrite were not going to be ready for the 1984 release date of the Macintosh; he therefore commissioned a team of programmers to work independently on a similar project, which eventually became WriteNow. Members of the WriteNow team knew about MacWrite, but members of the MacWrite team did not know about WriteNow. Ultimately, MacWrite was in fact completed on schedule and shipped with the Macintosh, while WriteNow was later made available as a commercial product after Steve Jobs left Apple to form NeXT. WriteNow was originally owned by NeXT and published by the T/Maker Company.
WriteNow improved on some of the limitations of MacWrite through the better handling of large documents and the adding of features such as spell check and footnotes. It was "lean and fast," being written entirely in assembly language, and could fit with a bootable operating system on a 400 KB floppy disk. WriteNow went through several versions, culminating (in 1993) with version 4.0.2, which continued with the "lean and fast" reputation. Version 4 also included features such as definable styles and tables.
WriteNow represented what many saw as an ideal Macintosh application. It had a simple, intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), no copy protection, and it worked in practically every revision of the Macintosh operating system, including OS 9 emulated in
WriteNow was ported to the NeXT operating system and was subsequently bundled with NeXT stations until 1991. Due to concerns of third-party publishers such as WordPerfect over the issue of competing with a free word processor, WriteNow for NeXT was transferred to T/Maker. TextEdit, which could essentially be considered a heavily stripped-down version of WriteNow, was its replacement. Around 1992, rights to WriteNow (for both Macintosh and NeXT operating systems) were purchased by WordStar. Shortly after that, WordStar was purchased by The Learning Company, and WriteNow was discontinued. The lifecycle of the 680x0 architecture was coming to an end in the personal computer market, and the 68k (Motorola 680x0) assembly language code that made WriteNow so much faster than its competitors also made it much more difficult to port to the new PowerPC processor than competing word processors written in high level languages such as C.
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