1980 – 1984retired
Apple III
“Tried to outgrow the Apple II; instead it taught Apple to love it again.”
“It taught the world what a blank page could look like. Rest easy, old friend.”
MacWrite was a WYSIWYG word processor released alongside the very first Apple Macintosh systems in 1984. Together with MacPaint, it was one of the two original killer applications that helped propel adoption of the GUI in general, and the Mac in particular. For many people, MacWrite was their first glimpse of what word processing could feel like.
Spun off to Claris, it received a major update as MacWrite II in 1989 and then MacWrite Pro in 1993, but improvements grew few and far between. By the mid-1990s it was no longer a serious contender, development ended around 1995, and it was fully discontinued in 1998 due to dwindling sales. It left behind a generation of users who learned to write on a Mac because of it.
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“Tried to outgrow the Apple II; instead it taught Apple to love it again.”
“It dot-matrixed its heart out so your Mac could be heard.”
“A Lisa in Mac clothing, gone before most of us learned to say MacWorks XL three times fast.”