Some of the software for early Macs is astonishing by modern standards. Clarisworks is an office suite that provides a word processor, spreadsheet, database, p

Some of the software for early Macs is astonishing by modern standards. Clarisworks is an office suite that provides a word processor, spreadsheet, database, paint, illustration, and program that should run on an 8 MHz 68000 based Macintosh Plus. A full installation was about 4 MB, but it could be trimmed down to 600 kB and retain its core functionality. That office suite was based upon Appleworks for the Apple II. While the latter was much more limited (e.g. no graphics), it had to deal with much tighter constraints. The accomplishments of those early programmers was astounding, particularly when you consider that many of those early programs had many of the features that we take for granted today. For example, both Appleworks and Clarisworks allowed you to share data between modules. I almost lust for the days when we could do so much with so little. Granted, that's not going to happen when a modern display requires pushing and storing three to four orders of magnitudes more bits to represent a square inch of graphics.