MacWrite

» see claris.com/macwrite as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the last shipping release was macwrite pro 1.5v3 in june 1994. claris kept the box on shelves for a few more years through bundling but did not put serious development hours into it after that. in 1998 the line was officially discontinued. by then microsoft word for mac had taken the mac word processor market almost entirely. nobody held a wake.

macwrite shipped on the 128k macintosh on 24 january 1984, bundled with macpaint as part of the system. randy wigginton wrote the original core with help from the apple toolbox team. it was a wysiwyg word processor at a time when most people typing on a personal computer were still looking at a green or amber console with a single font.

apple spun macwrite off to claris in 1987 as part of a broader software hand-off. claris shipped macwrite ii in 1989, which briefly clawed market share back from word and brought macwrite up to around 30 percent of the mac word processor market by 1990. macwrite pro arrived in 1993 with style sheets and table support, but by then word 5.1 for mac had become the office product nobody was switching out of.

i did not grow up with a mac. by the time i had a computer of my own in turkey it was a windows pc, and the word processor on it was microsoft word for windows. macwrite is a piece of computing history i mostly read about from screenshots and old apple manuals. the first mac word processor i actually opened myself was word 6, years later, on a borrowed lab machine at university.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

macwrite was one of the two apps that came with every original mac. the other was macpaint. for the first year of the mac's life, if you typed anything on the machine, you typed it in macwrite. that distribution was a large part of the reason a word processor with a one-page document size limit at launch survived against the more flexible options that came later.

~ the claris years ~

claris took on macwrite in 1987 as part of an apple-software spinoff. macwrite ii in 1989 was the inflection point. it added multiple fonts per document and footnotes, and brought the feature set into the late 80s. microsoft word had held roughly 60 percent of the mac word processor market through 1989. by 1990 word had slid to 45 percent and macwrite had climbed to 30. that was the high-water mark for the brand.

~ what killed it ~

word 5.1 for mac came out in 1992 and was the version that locked in microsoft's dominance. it was quick and full-featured, and the documents it produced were what other people opened without translation. once that interchange standard was set, macwrite stopped being a working option. macwrite pro in 1993 tried to catch up with style sheets and tables, but by then it was a feature release into a market where everyone had standardized on word.

~ the long tail ~

claris itself was reorganized in 1998 as filemaker inc, and the non-database software lines were retired. macwrite went onto the discontinued list along with macdraw and a few other holdovers. the file format lived on as something a few legacy converters could still read into the early 2000s. the brand stopped being a thing apple ever mentioned again.

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