#WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE SOFTWARE#
#WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE FREE#

(Screenshot courtesy of Paul Ford.)ĪppleWorks on the enhanced Apple IIe (1986) - What an odd move! I sold my Amiga and went back to the Apple II! It was Apple Garamond that made me do it. It was a proper word processor, rather basic, but it helped me get the schoolwork done. Finally I got Textcraft, made by Arktronix (who created the notable but unsuccessful windowed word processor suite, Jane). I had two different printers hanging off of my A1000 (an Epson LX-80 and a color Okimate 20) and for many months my only “word processor” was the extremely basic Notepad bundled with AmigaDOS.

#WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE SOFTWARE#

Textcraft on the Amiga 1000 (1986) - To say that software was slow to come for the Amiga after its late 1985 launch is an understatement. I even made some money doing page layout for students with that LC, MacWrite, and my StyleWriter printer. I never even had a printer hooked to that Mac! In the early ’90s I bought a Macintosh LC and used a much later version of MacWrite on that machine during part of college. I never did any real word processing on the Mac, however, because a week after getting it I saw an Amiga 1000 on display at the local computer shop, returned the Mac, and put an order in for the Amiga. I finally got a Macintosh, and it came with MacWrite and MacPaint. MacWrite on a Macintosh 128K (1985) - Now this is where I was trying to be, using MultiScribe on the //c. (Screenshot shows another document I recently found on my 32-year-old Apple Writer II data disk.) As such, I didn’t get much serious work done with this one. Its output to a dot-matrix printer was pretty rough looking, however. I was lusting for a Macintosh at the time and this felt like something of a bridge to that world of bitmap graphics and fancy fonts. MultiScribe on the Apple //c (1985) - After getting a mouse for the //c, I was able run StyleWare’s new MultiScribe WYSIWYG word processor. (Screenshot shows a document I recently found on my 32-year-old Apple Writer II data disk.) And it had 80 column text! The go-to word processor at that time was Apple Writer II, which was simple but functional - a dream compared to TI Writer! I had an Apple ImageWriter printer for output. (Screenshot shows the first 1/3 of the 80-column sample document I created for this post.)Īpple Writer II on the Apple //c (1984) - My next computer was the Apple //c which I got right after it launched in early 1984. I had a Smith-Corona TP-1 daisywheel printer hanging off of that board’s parallel port and became one of the very first kids in my class to hand work in done on a home computer. The TI could only generate a 40-column display, but TI Writer delivered a virtual 80-column page that could be viewed using a left, middle, and right panning window - a bit cumbersome, indeed. Wanting to start using a word processor for my school reports (6th grade), I made the obvious choice to go with TI Writer, a combination cartridge and disk program that output to a printer tied to the RS-232 interface card (if you had one). TI Writer on the TI-99/4A (1983) - My first computer, the TI-99/4A, was nice for games and educational programs, but wasn’t the ideal word processing platform. (I should underscore the fact that this post is not meant to be a look at the overall evolution of the word processor, but a look back at my own experiences over the years.) Reading the article, I began to reflect upon the word processors I have used over the past 35 years and it inspired me to write a little about a few of those that stand-out in my mind.

#WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE FREE#

A few days ago I was running through twitter when I saw Peter Cohen ( link to a blog post he had written about distraction free writing and the focused simplicity of a 30 year old word processor.

Word processor for apple