WriteNow

WriteNow was one of the two original word processor applications developed for the launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, and was the primary word processor for computers manufactured by NeXT. WriteNow was purchased from T/Maker by WordStar in 1993, but shortly after that, WordStar was purchased by The Learning Company, which ended sales. It remains fondly remembered to this day, for a combination of powerful features, excellent performance, and small system requirements.

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 completed on schedule and shipped with the Macintosh. This left WriteNow in limbo until Jobs left Apple to form NeXT. WriteNow was owned by NeXT, and released for the Macintosh in 1985, published by the T/Maker Company.

WriteNow improved on some of the limitations of MacWrite through the better handling of large documents and the addition of features such as spell check and footnotes. It was "lean and fast," being written entirely in assembly language, and could fit with the Macintosh operating system on a bootable 400 KB floppy disk. WriteNow went through several versions, culminating (in 1993) with version 4.0.2, which continued the "lean and fast" reputation while adding features such as tables and definable styles.

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