WriteNow

WriteNow was a word processor application released for Apple Macintosh computers in 1986.

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 was written by John Anderson and Bill Tschumy in Seattle, separate from where the Macintosh computer and MacWrite word processor were being developed. It is said that 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 WriteNow was later made available as a commercial product, owned by Steve Jobs' NeXT and published by the T/Maker Company.

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 Classic mode under Mac OS X. Its biggest claim to fame, however, was its speed. It was written in assembly language (Motorola 680x0) by a group of developers who had a reputation for producing extremely efficient code. The user interface was unusual in that while the typical word processor had a ruler embedded in the main document window, WriteNow used a separate, fixed window that could be sent into the background, freeing precious screen space on the Mac's 9" screen for writing.

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 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.