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> Word processors like MacWrite absolutely transformed the ways that everyone used computers. MacWrite was released 5 years after WordPerfect, which itself is

> Word processors like MacWrite absolutely transformed the ways that everyone used computers. MacWrite was released 5 years after WordPerfect, which itself is predated by WordStar. I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things. Apple refines what others have attempted before, that's what they're good at. Part of the reason people are disappointed with Apple these days is because of this fantasy image of Apple as an inventor.

Clamchop 2y ago
Author does say word processors "like" MacWrite, so falls short of saying it was the first at anything (and it wasn't), but WordPerfect and WordStar are interesting choices for comparison. Of the three, only MacWrite is a GUI-based WYSIWYG word processor that would be immediately familiar to modern audiences. (WordPerfect wouldn't get GUI until 1991.)
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Yeah, this. I mean, look, WordStar was a huge step up from a typewriter. It (and programs like it) made it possible for people like me to write. WordStar let you get the words right. WordPerfect let you do "you asked for it, you got it" layout, which was a step up. But MacWrite and programs like it let you do WYSIWYG layout, which was huge. It was like going from typewriter to WordStar, but for layout and appearance. (The words are still more important, but the presentation also matters.)
  - Kon-Peki 2y ago
    I always wonder how many people actually used typewriters before talking about them in comparison to word processors. By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so you could erase mistakes. You could set them to center or right justify text. You could create tables of justified text. Early word processing software was amazing because it gave you more memory to work with, and didn't force you to keep so much of what you previously wrote in your head. But it was only a large step forward compared to typewriters of the time. WYSIWYG blew all of that out of the water.
    - matwood 2y ago
      I learned to type on an electric typewriter :) It wasn't a fancy word processing one with memory, but just that the hammers struck the paper using a motor making it easier to type. It also made a very satisfying 'thunk' which I would randomly trigger while the teacher was talking that in turn caused me to get thrown out of class a number of times.
    - phil21 2y ago
      It's also technology was much less ubiquitous back then and less evenly distributed, at least in my experience. I went from a mechanical typewriter which had the whiteout tape as it's only "advanced" feature, directly to a WYSIWYG editor. It was absolutely night and day. I only saw an "advanced" electronic typewriter later in life at my grandparents house, which was used rarely and only for her accounting business as it was so expensive when they first bought it. As far as I know my experience was pretty much normal for my peer group - as my school had a similar setup. As a kid in school, it was amazing going from having to totally re-type a rough draft to being able to make some casual edits and hit print. Hours saved for each paper, especially with the typing skills I had back then!
      - wjnc 2y ago
        Most 70s-80s advanced typewriter were just not regular household material. Even among white collar jobs. My parents (and mini me) worked on very mediocre type writers, until my dad got a PC from work with WordPerfect. Interesting from an economical perspective is that the 'top' typewriters were a lot more affordable than early pc's. People just didn't buy them. What they had was good enough, regardless of features. My dad ended up so enthusiastic for PC's to later spend more than a monthly wage on a PC for the family (actually: me). Every two years. Incredible, especially compared to the afforability of digital devices nowadays. Word processing software was to writing as smartphones were to photography, or as the book press was to writing. Perhaps not transformational on a per feature basis, but transformational on grounds of the possibilities and market it unlocked.
    - michaelt 2y ago
      > By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so you could erase mistakes. Sure, there were electronic typewriters where you could type an entire line or two into memory before printing it. And, as you say, typewriters with whiteout reels that allowed you to backspace. But if you've started a new paragraph, and you realise you want to go back and edit the previous one, and everything else needs to move down a line to accommodate? Good chance you're throwing the page away and starting from scratch. Or you're cutting and pasting in the literal sense, using scissors and glue. Typewriters were difficult enough that "typist" was a professional job - and many workers wouldn't do their own typing, instead recording messages onto tiny tape cassettes for a typist to type up later on. There were even foot-pedal-controlled cassette players, so typists could type with their hands and control the dictaphone tape with their feet!
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    So you're saying MacWrite's beautiful graphical WYSIWYG layout is better than WordPerfect's cheap practical TOYOTA layout, which is a step up from WordStar's blocky brutalist CYBER TRUCK layout. ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVHg1CjqLk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVHg1CjqLk8
- leptons 2y ago
  And before Macwrite, or Macintosh computers existed, there was Xerox PARC and their GUI-based WYSIWYG editor called "Bravo", which Steve Jobs no doubt would have seen when he visited PARC.
  - RichardCA 2y ago
    That historic moment has been dramatized at least once. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u70CgBr-OI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u70CgBr-OI
    - sgerenser 2y ago
      I noticed Alan Kay himself in the comments, indicating about the only thing in the scene that is accurate is the guy playing Steve Jobs (Noah Wyle) looks/sounds similar to the real Jobs. Everything else was pure Hollywood fluff.
  - homarp 2y ago
    'Bravo' was produced at Xerox PARC by Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi and colleagues in 1974. Then Charles went to Microsoft where he started and led Microsoft's applications group, where he built the first versions of Microsoft Office
- WillAdams 2y ago
  It's interesting to note that when WordPerfect got a GUI, it had to be worked up separately for each platform --- the NeXTstep version was quite nice, took full advantage of Display PostScript, and was coded up by a couple of programmers in six weeks or so.
  - wat10000 2y ago
    That’s how cross-platform apps were. Middleware libraries that you could use to put the same GUI code on different OSes didn’t exist, and there wasn’t room for them anyway. Even sharing the core could be a tough proposition. I know that at least MS Word for Mac vs Windows was two completely separate programs that happened to share a name and a feature set. That continued until Mac MS Word 6.0 in 1994. That was a port of the Windows version, and very much disliked among the Mac userbase for being poor performance and not really behaving like a Mac app should. I don’t think cross-platform UI code really took off on the Mac until maybe 20 years later. Plenty of Mac apps were built that way before that point, but they tended to be ones in the “you’re stuck using this, so it doesn’t have to be very nice” category, like Word ended up being. It doesn’t really seem to have tipped until Electron came along, and somehow web apps that use half a gigabyte of RAM to show some text became totally accepted as good enough. Incidentally, the Cocoa UI framework that macOS uses was originally a cross platform framework that could deploy to Windows and various other OSes, back when it was made by NeXT. Apple. Apple killed that off and it became Mac-exclusive. I wonder what the world would look like if they kept support for other OSes. Maybe we’d have a good selection of cross platform apps that actually look nice and perform well.
    - mjevans 2y ago
      Real damage of Microsoft's Monopoly power. They have a severe case of Not Invented Here syndrome and even for free Open Source Software refuse to ship any of it naively unless they can fork it and pretend they wrote it (early TCP code based off BSD IIRC). It's horrendously tough to target for a cross-platform application when you have to bring the entire GUI toolkit along and adapt it individually to every target, even the 95% of the market gorilla that is whatever versions of Desktop Windows are the most recent 3.
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  But the example functionality is backspacing, which of course in no way requires a GUI. You could just as easily cite AtariWriter or Bank Street Writer, which came out before WordPerfect.
- blihp 2y ago
  It was implied by the phrase 'transformed the ways everyone used computers'. True, to younger computer users MacWrite would be the most familiar of the three. However, in terms of total unit sales and percentage of users for their day, MacWrite was practically rounding error in the word processor market. It was WordStar and then WordPerfect that dominated (and therefore 'transformed...') until the early/mid-90's when MS Word took over.
  - turnsout 2y ago
    The point stands—we don't use the descendants of TUI word processors today. We essentially all use GUIs.
- ja27 2y ago
  WordPerfect for classic MacOS came out in 1988. It always felt like they bought someone else's product but apparently it was an in-house port.
chongli 2y ago
MacWrite was a WYSIWYG word processor. You could change the fonts or other formatting and see the results updated on the screen. WordStar and WordPerfect were for DOS. They were not WYSIWYG. Sure they were powerful word processors for professionals, but they were not “like” MacWrite. MacWrite was a tool for regular people.
- shakna 2y ago
  I absolutely would have described WordStar as a WYSIWYG editor. [0] You have no content markings, you do have pages in sight, and flowing text. You set the text to bold, and the font displayed is bold, etc. I don't think I'm alone in that judgement, as Wiki says: "WordStar was the first microcomputer word processor to offer mail merge and textual WYSIWYG." [1] So... You might need to expand why you think that this is not true. [0] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wordstar-under-vdosplus.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/words... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar
  - quesera 2y ago
    > textual WYSIWYG You said it. WordStar did not have fonts. MacWrite did. WYSIWYG without fonts is ... I don't know ... "textual WYSIWYG"? Whatever that is.
    - shakna 2y ago
      Textual means that it ran in text mode. That doesn't mean that it did not have fonts. It... Did. There's two fonts in the screenshot I linked beforehand.
      - quesera 2y ago
        I'd call those two "styles" of the same font family. The Macintosh system software shipped with about 12 distinctly-different fonts. Most of which also had italic, bold, outline, etc styles. These fonts could also be rendered at different point sizes.
deleted 2y ago
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tokinonagare 2y ago
> Apple refines what others have attempted before, that's what they're good at. Exactly. And often the first version is often kind of meh (iPhone, Watch, Vision Pro) but they keep iterating and later versions become really good. Sometimes it's a hit directly (M1), it's still very iterative on whatever came before.
- tim333 2y ago
  And of course the M1 Air is basically another in the line of Macbook Airs but with a better processor.
EGreg 2y ago
[flagged]
- LeafItAlone 2y ago
  >Also, Apple’s processors were always the best, until they switched to Intel, then those were the best. That can be true…
  - wat10000 2y ago
    PowerPC was pretty great for a while. Then Motorola and IBM started dropped the ball (or rather, stopped putting resources into what was not a particularly big customer) and Apple switched away.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      Wasn't Apple part of the PowerPC alliance?
      - wat10000 2y ago
        They were, but Motorola and IBM designed and manufactured the CPUs. Apple presumably had some input, and they designed hardware platforms for the alliance, and of course software.
leptons 2y ago
> I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things. This is the famous "reality distortion field" you may have heard of. It's basically a form of tribalism taken to an absurd level.
bennythomsson 2y ago
It goes on. > the new standard that companies like Samsung and Google would clone the same way they cloned the hardware and software design of the iPhone. That's misrepresenting history in ways it's not even funny. Stopped reading at that point. The article took too long to even sketch it's main point anyway.
- Clubber 2y ago
  IIRC, all the Google/Samsung phones had keyboards because they copied the Blackberry. Once the iPhone was released with the screen keyboard, all the Google phones changed to that. They didn't clone everything, but they cloned a lot in the early days. Rounded corners was another one. Now it seems like Apple is cloning Google/Samsung more.
  - tmzt 2y ago
    The first versions of Android that the public saw were very similar to the OS on a BlackBerry or Danger HipTop. The G1 even used the same mechanism to deploy the keyboard. As far as the rounded corners, I remember seeing a reduced Google Reader view of Engadget later that year that had every device looking the same from the top third up. I really wish I had a screenshot. There is now a lot of cross inspriation and features that are copied in both directions, as well as both implementing the same thing at around the same time (Intelligence and Gemini). On the Android side, Pixel gets most new features first while Samsung offers their own take. Samsung is generally ahead of their direct competitors in terms of hardware.
    - scosman 2y ago
      Nit: the Danger mechanism was waaaaay cooler than the G1's. It did this amazing spin I've always missed. The G1 was a little 2-hinge flip-up that was satisfying, but didn't do the amazing 180 that the sidekick did.
  - dexterdog 2y ago
    There were no google phones until 2010 unless you count the HTCDream which was not designed to be used for anything but development.
quesera 2y ago
Apple has always done both -- invented and refined. Claiming that Apple does not invent is as gobsmackingly wrong as claiming that Apple invented everything.
- randunel 2y ago
  What did apple invent? Is it really more than a couple of things? (Applying existing ideas to new systems isn't inventing)
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    Name a few things you consider to be inventions first to get the ball rolling. For example, you could claim that nothing new in CMOS manufacturing exists because it’s all just the existing idea of a transistor. Or the transistor is just a quantum mechanic version of the vacuum tube. Or the vacuum tube just an electric version of the Babbage machine. Repeat for Internet vs packet switching. Basically come up with a definition that doesn’t require a “I know it when I see it step” and I’ll easily fit many things Apple did in there unless it’s such a restrictive definition that no one invents anything. “If I have seen futher, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”
    - quesera 2y ago
      On some level, all invention is a novel arrangement of existing components. All the way down to the physics, if you're willing. So, does anyone "invent" anything? But if we accept "patentable" as a proxy for "invented", then obviously Apple invents a lot.
      - snowfarthing 2y ago
        But those of us who think the entire idea of "patentability" is a joke in and of itself. All these fuzzy lines behind this "who invented what" is a major reason I consider patents to be evil -- the entire system sets up artificial and harmful barriers keeping ideas from fertilizing each other and growing beyond our wildest imaginations. (And as someone who strongly dislikes all things Apple -- but not quite as much as all things Windows -- I cannot help but observe that both Apple and Microsoft simultaneously deserve both more and less acknowledgement, all depending on how one looks at things, for their inventiveness).
adamc 2y ago
Yes, but having used both in that time period... tools on the mac were graphical and easily explored (open a menu and see what was available). People made plastic keyboard templates for WordPerfect and WordStar just to remember the commands. On top of that, you could easily task switch on a Mac. There were some tools for doing that with DOS, but they were awful by comparison. I worked in a lab that used PCs while I owned a Mac Plus. There was no comparison.
runjake 2y ago
MacWrite was released in 1984. 7 years before comparable graphical, WYSIWYG competitors. WordPerfect for Windows was released in 1991. Prior versions were MS-DOS and not graphical. WordStar for Windows was released in about 1991. Prior versions were MS-DOS and not graphical. What made MacWrite special, is that it was graphical, highly WYSIWYG (especially when paired with an Apple printer), had a lot of great fonts, and the software was intuitive. Of course Apple didn't invent any of it, but they made one of the best word processing products at the time.
- jpadkins 2y ago
  How do you measure best? Based on usage, sales, or fraction of published text created - Wordperfect or Wordstar were way ahead of MacWrite. MacWrite was the best in a niche market of personal newsletters that wanted graphical elements. More professional desktop publishers used Aldus PageMaker. And big publishing houses didn't use PCs or software, they used offset lithography presses.
  - philistine 2y ago
    It's like you decided to completely disregard that the successor of MacWrite ended up completely eating all the use cases for making documents outside of the large-scale professional uses. MacWrite begat Microsoft Word 3.01, which is when Word overtook MacWrite on Mac and became truly competitive with WordPerfect on DOS.
    - jpadkins 2y ago
      So your basis for saying "one of the best word processing products at the time." is that a different company made a different product inspired by it (and WordPerfect)? I don't think that is a persuasive argument. If you said MacWrite was an innovative word processor, I would not have replied. Most innovative is not always the best product at the time.
      - runjake 2y ago
        You're replying to a commenter here, not the OP. I am the actual OP. If you're concerned by my use of the word "best", please replace that word with "innovative for consumers". If you have an issue with this new wording, then we'll have to agree to disagree. While MacWrite may or may not have been "niche" as you said, it most definitely heavily influenced another "niche" word processor available today: Microsoft Word. Word for Mac (1985) was the first graphical version of Word and it was heavily inspired by MacWrite.
j45 2y ago
Apple certainly doesn’t invent everything. Calling what they do as mere refinement may be equally understating it in some cases. They get it right. For the masses. They create beginners. Anyone can start with an Apple, because it’s what it’s designed to do. I have my own biases that extreme usability started earlier with other movements like WebOS and Palm contributing to it as well. Still, if we look for watershed moments where huge numbers of people in the mainstream adopt technology, whether it’s the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, watch, laptops, they don’t need to be the first, just the best for the most number of people. Being able to integrate hardware and software closely creates a different and reliable result for the many, as much as I might not like having complete agency. If anything, Apple helps invent beginners in the mainstream.
- dexterdog 2y ago
  > They get it right. For the masses. They create beginners. I used to think that about Apple which is why I got the iphone 4s when it came out assuming that I would be able to use it via voice while driving and have a good experience. I disabled it after the first day and never went back. It was not remotely ready for a wide release. I still use a mac as my main device, but I've been on Android since the 4s.
  - j45 2y ago
    That fair. Im referring to the general trend of adoption of smartphones being a certain way with Apple. Like others, I’ve spent time back and forth between iPhone and Android while using Macs more. Android dialled in was pretty comfortable for me, iPhone was a lot more taps and swipes for the same, but the vertical integration is harder to ignore.
philistine 2y ago
You're basically explaining why the Macintosh stayed niche when it came out. People saw the barebones WYSIWYG of WordPerfect 4.0 on PC in 1984 compared to the true WYSIWYG of MacWrite and they said: It's what we already have, why would I need a Mac?
jjulius 2y ago
>I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things. This is entirely tangential and probably a pointless gripe in this thread, but... For some reason, it's always really annoyed me that Apple took MP3 players, called them an 'iPod' and suddenly everyone ate them up like they were the second coming of christ and we'd never had them ever before.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  As someone who was There At The Time, the UX of the iPod was really, really good. There were few, if any, other companies that could match it. The vast majority of competing music players were what DankPods calls "nuggets" - i.e. barely functional e-waste that were either saddled down with horrible software (e.g. anything Sony made), had horrible controls, were bulky and painful to use, or some combination of those above dealbreakers. A lot of companies treated developing an MP3 player like any other kind of music player, and ignored the fact that these things could hold 100x as much music as anything else on the market, which necessitated a completely new UX. To be clear, there were good non-Apple MP3 players, but they were either marketed poorly, or late arrivals (e.g. the Toshiba player that got rebadged into the Zune). By the time those existed (and tech companies started hiring UI/UX people), Apple was doing a complete reset of another product category: smartphones. I suspect history would have been different had, say, MiniDisc hadn't failed horribly in America[0]. Pre-iPod, portable music in the US was either compact cassettes with all the downsides of tape, or CD players that could just barely fit in your pocket. The iPod was such a step up from either that it all but became a genericized trademark. Had we had a competing technology from not the 1980s, we probably wouldn't have thought the iPod was so great. Or at least, people I knew who had MiniDisc looked at the iPod like I look at all the e-waste that was trying to compete with the iPod. [0] Yes, I know that Sony was basically trying to avoid a repeat of DAT getting banned
  - MisterTea 2y ago
    > the UX of the iPod was really, really good. The iPod is the only Apple product I have ever purchased. I could easily operate the iPod without having to looking at it constantly which was great for bike rides or car rides. No fiddling and taking eyes off road.
wnevets 2y ago
> I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things. Happens all the time with the iPhone. Apple gets celebrated as an innovator for adding features that have existed for years on Android.
jmull 2y ago
WordPerfect and WordStar were text-based at the time MacWrite came out as a WYSIWYG word processor. Not to say MacWrite wasn't based on prior work (it was, though not actual products that I know of), but it isn't really comparable to prior text-based word processors.
SeanLuke 2y ago
> MacWrite was released 5 years after WordPerfect, which itself is predated by WordStar. I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things. Um, hello, Wang OIS? WordStar and WordPerfect didn't invent anything. They were copies of terminal-based word processors. But MacWrite was different in two important ways. First, like Bravo and Gypsy before it, it was WYSIWYG, a million times better than WordStar/WordPerfect. And it worked with the LaserWriter. But more importantly: it was free. This made MacWrite revolutionary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software)
- snowfarthing 2y ago
  Nowadays, as someone who has heavily used LaTeX, I think WYSIWYG is rightly dismissed as WYSIAYG (ie "What You See Is ALL You Get"). There's a certain power that comes when you can designate that something is a section header, or a title, or a paragraph, or an equation -- and that power is felt when you decide you want to change the style for all the titles and section headers, or change how you number and reference equations and theorems. Word processors (to the best of my knowledge -- it's been years since I've used one) can't do this. This kind of power comes from markup languages, like LaTeX or HTML/CSS (if you organize your documents correctly). Having said that, there are LaTeX editors that both provide a certain amount of "What You See Is What You Get" (I think one is called "LyX", and I think GUI Emacs provides this, too) but nonetheless allow you to use LaTeX directly when you need it; I guess this is equivalent to the "Show Codes" ability that WordPerfect provided. (I wouldn't know, though, because I prefer to use Vim to write my documents.) Also, I would agree that when things become freely available, that can be a game-changer, but as someone who grew up with a terminal and a giant computer with 8-inch disks and an Atari 800XL, when a neighbor showed off his Macintosh, it would be out of the question for my family to think of that as "free".
gordon_freeman 2y ago
Siri had so many years to iterate and get refined that by now I'd assume it would have been as omnipresent assistant as in "Her" movie (without negative impact of course) but see where we are today: I am still using it for only weather and setting alarms and even in that it sometimes works and sometimes does not.
buryat 2y ago
Inventions are pretty cheap without the refinement of the product that directly contributes to the customers' demand additionally backed by robust supply chains and delivery of cutting edge tech like the M-line up of chips, and the tremendous camera quality, battery life, reliability of the operating system, specially curated app store, security and privacy, etc. Inventions are not what people want to pay for, people want to pay for additional value added in all sorts of form. Apple creates products for humans and people pay back by seeing the offering as a higher valued product.
robenkleene 2y ago
I think what Apple excels at is providing a set of software development tools, a platform, and an audience, for third-party developers to then use to build innovative products, the best of which either become platforms of their own if they're lucky (e.g., Adobe suite), or are copied by Apple and made part of their operating systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)). In addition to Watson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson), there's also Cover Flow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Flow), Shortcuts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortcuts_(Apple) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortcuts_(Apple)), Konfabulator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Widgets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Widgets), Growl (https://growl.github.io/growl/ https://growl.github.io/growl/), and of course my favorite LaunchBar (https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html, LaunchBar would be my pick as the most innovative app of the last 25 years), for apps that were incorporated into macOS. While Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Lightroom, Premiere, and PowerPoint are all examples of software developed and released first for the Mac that then went on to become software behemoths in their own right (too big to Sherlock). (Well Sketch turned out differently, because Figma happened, but it's still a great example of third-party innovation facilitated by "a set of software development tools, a platform, and an audience".) The point here being I think of Apple as more providing a platform for innovation rather than innovating themselves (but I'm aware that's probably a minority opinion).
napierzaza 2y ago
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zelphirkalt 2y ago
Apple fans do this to justify their decision to buy Apple products to their circles and most of all, to themselves. Or it is just delusion from not actually knowing better.

Clamchop 2y ago

Author does say word processors "like" MacWrite, so falls short of saying it was the first at anything (and it wasn't), but WordPerfect and WordStar are interesting choices for comparison. Of the three, only MacWrite is a GUI-based WYSIWYG word processor that would be immediately familiar to modern audiences. (WordPerfect wouldn't get GUI until 1991.)

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Yeah, this. I mean, look, WordStar was a huge step up from a typewriter. It (and programs like it) made it possible for people like me to write. WordStar let you get the words right. WordPerfect let you do "you asked for it, you got it" layout, which was a step up. But MacWrite and programs like it let you do WYSIWYG layout, which was huge. It was like going from typewriter to WordStar, but for layout and appearance. (The words are still more important, but the presentation also matters.)
- Kon-Peki 2y ago
  I always wonder how many people actually used typewriters before talking about them in comparison to word processors. By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so you could erase mistakes. You could set them to center or right justify text. You could create tables of justified text. Early word processing software was amazing because it gave you more memory to work with, and didn't force you to keep so much of what you previously wrote in your head. But it was only a large step forward compared to typewriters of the time. WYSIWYG blew all of that out of the water.
  - matwood 2y ago
    I learned to type on an electric typewriter :) It wasn't a fancy word processing one with memory, but just that the hammers struck the paper using a motor making it easier to type. It also made a very satisfying 'thunk' which I would randomly trigger while the teacher was talking that in turn caused me to get thrown out of class a number of times.
  - phil21 2y ago
    It's also technology was much less ubiquitous back then and less evenly distributed, at least in my experience. I went from a mechanical typewriter which had the whiteout tape as it's only "advanced" feature, directly to a WYSIWYG editor. It was absolutely night and day. I only saw an "advanced" electronic typewriter later in life at my grandparents house, which was used rarely and only for her accounting business as it was so expensive when they first bought it. As far as I know my experience was pretty much normal for my peer group - as my school had a similar setup. As a kid in school, it was amazing going from having to totally re-type a rough draft to being able to make some casual edits and hit print. Hours saved for each paper, especially with the typing skills I had back then!
    - wjnc 2y ago
      Most 70s-80s advanced typewriter were just not regular household material. Even among white collar jobs. My parents (and mini me) worked on very mediocre type writers, until my dad got a PC from work with WordPerfect. Interesting from an economical perspective is that the 'top' typewriters were a lot more affordable than early pc's. People just didn't buy them. What they had was good enough, regardless of features. My dad ended up so enthusiastic for PC's to later spend more than a monthly wage on a PC for the family (actually: me). Every two years. Incredible, especially compared to the afforability of digital devices nowadays. Word processing software was to writing as smartphones were to photography, or as the book press was to writing. Perhaps not transformational on a per feature basis, but transformational on grounds of the possibilities and market it unlocked.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    > By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so you could erase mistakes. Sure, there were electronic typewriters where you could type an entire line or two into memory before printing it. And, as you say, typewriters with whiteout reels that allowed you to backspace. But if you've started a new paragraph, and you realise you want to go back and edit the previous one, and everything else needs to move down a line to accommodate? Good chance you're throwing the page away and starting from scratch. Or you're cutting and pasting in the literal sense, using scissors and glue. Typewriters were difficult enough that "typist" was a professional job - and many workers wouldn't do their own typing, instead recording messages onto tiny tape cassettes for a typist to type up later on. There were even foot-pedal-controlled cassette players, so typists could type with their hands and control the dictaphone tape with their feet!
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  So you're saying MacWrite's beautiful graphical WYSIWYG layout is better than WordPerfect's cheap practical TOYOTA layout, which is a step up from WordStar's blocky brutalist CYBER TRUCK layout. ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVHg1CjqLk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVHg1CjqLk8
leptons 2y ago
And before Macwrite, or Macintosh computers existed, there was Xerox PARC and their GUI-based WYSIWYG editor called "Bravo", which Steve Jobs no doubt would have seen when he visited PARC.
- RichardCA 2y ago
  That historic moment has been dramatized at least once. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u70CgBr-OI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u70CgBr-OI
  - sgerenser 2y ago
    I noticed Alan Kay himself in the comments, indicating about the only thing in the scene that is accurate is the guy playing Steve Jobs (Noah Wyle) looks/sounds similar to the real Jobs. Everything else was pure Hollywood fluff.
- homarp 2y ago
  'Bravo' was produced at Xerox PARC by Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi and colleagues in 1974. Then Charles went to Microsoft where he started and led Microsoft's applications group, where he built the first versions of Microsoft Office
WillAdams 2y ago
It's interesting to note that when WordPerfect got a GUI, it had to be worked up separately for each platform --- the NeXTstep version was quite nice, took full advantage of Display PostScript, and was coded up by a couple of programmers in six weeks or so.
- wat10000 2y ago
  That’s how cross-platform apps were. Middleware libraries that you could use to put the same GUI code on different OSes didn’t exist, and there wasn’t room for them anyway. Even sharing the core could be a tough proposition. I know that at least MS Word for Mac vs Windows was two completely separate programs that happened to share a name and a feature set. That continued until Mac MS Word 6.0 in 1994. That was a port of the Windows version, and very much disliked among the Mac userbase for being poor performance and not really behaving like a Mac app should. I don’t think cross-platform UI code really took off on the Mac until maybe 20 years later. Plenty of Mac apps were built that way before that point, but they tended to be ones in the “you’re stuck using this, so it doesn’t have to be very nice” category, like Word ended up being. It doesn’t really seem to have tipped until Electron came along, and somehow web apps that use half a gigabyte of RAM to show some text became totally accepted as good enough. Incidentally, the Cocoa UI framework that macOS uses was originally a cross platform framework that could deploy to Windows and various other OSes, back when it was made by NeXT. Apple. Apple killed that off and it became Mac-exclusive. I wonder what the world would look like if they kept support for other OSes. Maybe we’d have a good selection of cross platform apps that actually look nice and perform well.
  - mjevans 2y ago
    Real damage of Microsoft's Monopoly power. They have a severe case of Not Invented Here syndrome and even for free Open Source Software refuse to ship any of it naively unless they can fork it and pretend they wrote it (early TCP code based off BSD IIRC). It's horrendously tough to target for a cross-platform application when you have to bring the entire GUI toolkit along and adapt it individually to every target, even the 95% of the market gorilla that is whatever versions of Desktop Windows are the most recent 3.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
But the example functionality is backspacing, which of course in no way requires a GUI. You could just as easily cite AtariWriter or Bank Street Writer, which came out before WordPerfect.
blihp 2y ago
It was implied by the phrase 'transformed the ways everyone used computers'. True, to younger computer users MacWrite would be the most familiar of the three. However, in terms of total unit sales and percentage of users for their day, MacWrite was practically rounding error in the word processor market. It was WordStar and then WordPerfect that dominated (and therefore 'transformed...') until the early/mid-90's when MS Word took over.
- turnsout 2y ago
  The point stands—we don't use the descendants of TUI word processors today. We essentially all use GUIs.
ja27 2y ago
WordPerfect for classic MacOS came out in 1988. It always felt like they bought someone else's product but apparently it was an in-house port.

chongli 2y ago

MacWrite was a WYSIWYG word processor. You could change the fonts or other formatting and see the results updated on the screen. WordStar and WordPerfect were for DOS. They were not WYSIWYG. Sure they were powerful word processors for professionals, but they were not “like” MacWrite. MacWrite was a tool for regular people.

shakna 2y ago
I absolutely would have described WordStar as a WYSIWYG editor. [0] You have no content markings, you do have pages in sight, and flowing text. You set the text to bold, and the font displayed is bold, etc. I don't think I'm alone in that judgement, as Wiki says: "WordStar was the first microcomputer word processor to offer mail merge and textual WYSIWYG." [1] So... You might need to expand why you think that this is not true. [0] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wordstar-under-vdosplus.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/words... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar
- quesera 2y ago
  > textual WYSIWYG You said it. WordStar did not have fonts. MacWrite did. WYSIWYG without fonts is ... I don't know ... "textual WYSIWYG"? Whatever that is.
  - shakna 2y ago
    Textual means that it ran in text mode. That doesn't mean that it did not have fonts. It... Did. There's two fonts in the screenshot I linked beforehand.
    - quesera 2y ago
      I'd call those two "styles" of the same font family. The Macintosh system software shipped with about 12 distinctly-different fonts. Most of which also had italic, bold, outline, etc styles. These fonts could also be rendered at different point sizes.

deleted 2y ago

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tokinonagare 2y ago

> Apple refines what others have attempted before, that's what they're good at. Exactly. And often the first version is often kind of meh (iPhone, Watch, Vision Pro) but they keep iterating and later versions become really good. Sometimes it's a hit directly (M1), it's still very iterative on whatever came before.

tim333 2y ago
And of course the M1 Air is basically another in the line of Macbook Airs but with a better processor.

EGreg 2y ago

[flagged]

LeafItAlone 2y ago
>Also, Apple’s processors were always the best, until they switched to Intel, then those were the best. That can be true…
- wat10000 2y ago
  PowerPC was pretty great for a while. Then Motorola and IBM started dropped the ball (or rather, stopped putting resources into what was not a particularly big customer) and Apple switched away.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Wasn't Apple part of the PowerPC alliance?
    - wat10000 2y ago
      They were, but Motorola and IBM designed and manufactured the CPUs. Apple presumably had some input, and they designed hardware platforms for the alliance, and of course software.

leptons 2y ago

> I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things. This is the famous "reality distortion field" you may have heard of. It's basically a form of tribalism taken to an absurd level.

bennythomsson 2y ago

It goes on. > the new standard that companies like Samsung and Google would clone the same way they cloned the hardware and software design of the iPhone. That's misrepresenting history in ways it's not even funny. Stopped reading at that point. The article took too long to even sketch it's main point anyway.

Clubber 2y ago
IIRC, all the Google/Samsung phones had keyboards because they copied the Blackberry. Once the iPhone was released with the screen keyboard, all the Google phones changed to that. They didn't clone everything, but they cloned a lot in the early days. Rounded corners was another one. Now it seems like Apple is cloning Google/Samsung more.
- tmzt 2y ago
  The first versions of Android that the public saw were very similar to the OS on a BlackBerry or Danger HipTop. The G1 even used the same mechanism to deploy the keyboard. As far as the rounded corners, I remember seeing a reduced Google Reader view of Engadget later that year that had every device looking the same from the top third up. I really wish I had a screenshot. There is now a lot of cross inspriation and features that are copied in both directions, as well as both implementing the same thing at around the same time (Intelligence and Gemini). On the Android side, Pixel gets most new features first while Samsung offers their own take. Samsung is generally ahead of their direct competitors in terms of hardware.
  - scosman 2y ago
    Nit: the Danger mechanism was waaaaay cooler than the G1's. It did this amazing spin I've always missed. The G1 was a little 2-hinge flip-up that was satisfying, but didn't do the amazing 180 that the sidekick did.
- dexterdog 2y ago
  There were no google phones until 2010 unless you count the HTCDream which was not designed to be used for anything but development.

quesera 2y ago

Apple has always done both -- invented and refined. Claiming that Apple does not invent is as gobsmackingly wrong as claiming that Apple invented everything.

randunel 2y ago
What did apple invent? Is it really more than a couple of things? (Applying existing ideas to new systems isn't inventing)
- vlovich123 2y ago
  Name a few things you consider to be inventions first to get the ball rolling. For example, you could claim that nothing new in CMOS manufacturing exists because it’s all just the existing idea of a transistor. Or the transistor is just a quantum mechanic version of the vacuum tube. Or the vacuum tube just an electric version of the Babbage machine. Repeat for Internet vs packet switching. Basically come up with a definition that doesn’t require a “I know it when I see it step” and I’ll easily fit many things Apple did in there unless it’s such a restrictive definition that no one invents anything. “If I have seen futher, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”
  - quesera 2y ago
    On some level, all invention is a novel arrangement of existing components. All the way down to the physics, if you're willing. So, does anyone "invent" anything? But if we accept "patentable" as a proxy for "invented", then obviously Apple invents a lot.
    - snowfarthing 2y ago
      But those of us who think the entire idea of "patentability" is a joke in and of itself. All these fuzzy lines behind this "who invented what" is a major reason I consider patents to be evil -- the entire system sets up artificial and harmful barriers keeping ideas from fertilizing each other and growing beyond our wildest imaginations. (And as someone who strongly dislikes all things Apple -- but not quite as much as all things Windows -- I cannot help but observe that both Apple and Microsoft simultaneously deserve both more and less acknowledgement, all depending on how one looks at things, for their inventiveness).

adamc 2y ago

Yes, but having used both in that time period... tools on the mac were graphical and easily explored (open a menu and see what was available). People made plastic keyboard templates for WordPerfect and WordStar just to remember the commands. On top of that, you could easily task switch on a Mac. There were some tools for doing that with DOS, but they were awful by comparison. I worked in a lab that used PCs while I owned a Mac Plus. There was no comparison.

runjake 2y ago

MacWrite was released in 1984. 7 years before comparable graphical, WYSIWYG competitors. WordPerfect for Windows was released in 1991. Prior versions were MS-DOS and not graphical. WordStar for Windows was released in about 1991. Prior versions were MS-DOS and not graphical. What made MacWrite special, is that it was graphical, highly WYSIWYG (especially when paired with an Apple printer), had a lot of great fonts, and the software was intuitive. Of course Apple didn't invent any of it, but they made one of the best word processing products at the time.

jpadkins 2y ago
How do you measure best? Based on usage, sales, or fraction of published text created - Wordperfect or Wordstar were way ahead of MacWrite. MacWrite was the best in a niche market of personal newsletters that wanted graphical elements. More professional desktop publishers used Aldus PageMaker. And big publishing houses didn't use PCs or software, they used offset lithography presses.
- philistine 2y ago
  It's like you decided to completely disregard that the successor of MacWrite ended up completely eating all the use cases for making documents outside of the large-scale professional uses. MacWrite begat Microsoft Word 3.01, which is when Word overtook MacWrite on Mac and became truly competitive with WordPerfect on DOS.
  - jpadkins 2y ago
    So your basis for saying "one of the best word processing products at the time." is that a different company made a different product inspired by it (and WordPerfect)? I don't think that is a persuasive argument. If you said MacWrite was an innovative word processor, I would not have replied. Most innovative is not always the best product at the time.
    - runjake 2y ago
      You're replying to a commenter here, not the OP. I am the actual OP. If you're concerned by my use of the word "best", please replace that word with "innovative for consumers". If you have an issue with this new wording, then we'll have to agree to disagree. While MacWrite may or may not have been "niche" as you said, it most definitely heavily influenced another "niche" word processor available today: Microsoft Word. Word for Mac (1985) was the first graphical version of Word and it was heavily inspired by MacWrite.

j45 2y ago

Apple certainly doesn’t invent everything. Calling what they do as mere refinement may be equally understating it in some cases. They get it right. For the masses. They create beginners. Anyone can start with an Apple, because it’s what it’s designed to do. I have my own biases that extreme usability started earlier with other movements like WebOS and Palm contributing to it as well. Still, if we look for watershed moments where huge numbers of people in the mainstream adopt technology, whether it’s the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, watch, laptops, they don’t need to be the first, just the best for the most number of people. Being able to integrate hardware and software closely creates a different and reliable result for the many, as much as I might not like having complete agency. If anything, Apple helps invent beginners in the mainstream.

dexterdog 2y ago
> They get it right. For the masses. They create beginners. I used to think that about Apple which is why I got the iphone 4s when it came out assuming that I would be able to use it via voice while driving and have a good experience. I disabled it after the first day and never went back. It was not remotely ready for a wide release. I still use a mac as my main device, but I've been on Android since the 4s.
- j45 2y ago
  That fair. Im referring to the general trend of adoption of smartphones being a certain way with Apple. Like others, I’ve spent time back and forth between iPhone and Android while using Macs more. Android dialled in was pretty comfortable for me, iPhone was a lot more taps and swipes for the same, but the vertical integration is harder to ignore.

philistine 2y ago

You're basically explaining why the Macintosh stayed niche when it came out. People saw the barebones WYSIWYG of WordPerfect 4.0 on PC in 1984 compared to the true WYSIWYG of MacWrite and they said: It's what we already have, why would I need a Mac?

jjulius 2y ago

>I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things. This is entirely tangential and probably a pointless gripe in this thread, but... For some reason, it's always really annoyed me that Apple took MP3 players, called them an 'iPod' and suddenly everyone ate them up like they were the second coming of christ and we'd never had them ever before.

kmeisthax 2y ago
As someone who was There At The Time, the UX of the iPod was really, really good. There were few, if any, other companies that could match it. The vast majority of competing music players were what DankPods calls "nuggets" - i.e. barely functional e-waste that were either saddled down with horrible software (e.g. anything Sony made), had horrible controls, were bulky and painful to use, or some combination of those above dealbreakers. A lot of companies treated developing an MP3 player like any other kind of music player, and ignored the fact that these things could hold 100x as much music as anything else on the market, which necessitated a completely new UX. To be clear, there were good non-Apple MP3 players, but they were either marketed poorly, or late arrivals (e.g. the Toshiba player that got rebadged into the Zune). By the time those existed (and tech companies started hiring UI/UX people), Apple was doing a complete reset of another product category: smartphones. I suspect history would have been different had, say, MiniDisc hadn't failed horribly in America[0]. Pre-iPod, portable music in the US was either compact cassettes with all the downsides of tape, or CD players that could just barely fit in your pocket. The iPod was such a step up from either that it all but became a genericized trademark. Had we had a competing technology from not the 1980s, we probably wouldn't have thought the iPod was so great. Or at least, people I knew who had MiniDisc looked at the iPod like I look at all the e-waste that was trying to compete with the iPod. [0] Yes, I know that Sony was basically trying to avoid a repeat of DAT getting banned
- MisterTea 2y ago
  > the UX of the iPod was really, really good. The iPod is the only Apple product I have ever purchased. I could easily operate the iPod without having to looking at it constantly which was great for bike rides or car rides. No fiddling and taking eyes off road.

wnevets 2y ago

> I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things. Happens all the time with the iPhone. Apple gets celebrated as an innovator for adding features that have existed for years on Android.

jmull 2y ago

WordPerfect and WordStar were text-based at the time MacWrite came out as a WYSIWYG word processor. Not to say MacWrite wasn't based on prior work (it was, though not actual products that I know of), but it isn't really comparable to prior text-based word processors.

SeanLuke 2y ago

> MacWrite was released 5 years after WordPerfect, which itself is predated by WordStar. I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things. Um, hello, Wang OIS? WordStar and WordPerfect didn't invent anything. They were copies of terminal-based word processors. But MacWrite was different in two important ways. First, like Bravo and Gypsy before it, it was WYSIWYG, a million times better than WordStar/WordPerfect. And it worked with the LaserWriter. But more importantly: it was free. This made MacWrite revolutionary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software)

snowfarthing 2y ago
Nowadays, as someone who has heavily used LaTeX, I think WYSIWYG is rightly dismissed as WYSIAYG (ie "What You See Is ALL You Get"). There's a certain power that comes when you can designate that something is a section header, or a title, or a paragraph, or an equation -- and that power is felt when you decide you want to change the style for all the titles and section headers, or change how you number and reference equations and theorems. Word processors (to the best of my knowledge -- it's been years since I've used one) can't do this. This kind of power comes from markup languages, like LaTeX or HTML/CSS (if you organize your documents correctly). Having said that, there are LaTeX editors that both provide a certain amount of "What You See Is What You Get" (I think one is called "LyX", and I think GUI Emacs provides this, too) but nonetheless allow you to use LaTeX directly when you need it; I guess this is equivalent to the "Show Codes" ability that WordPerfect provided. (I wouldn't know, though, because I prefer to use Vim to write my documents.) Also, I would agree that when things become freely available, that can be a game-changer, but as someone who grew up with a terminal and a giant computer with 8-inch disks and an Atari 800XL, when a neighbor showed off his Macintosh, it would be out of the question for my family to think of that as "free".

gordon_freeman 2y ago

Siri had so many years to iterate and get refined that by now I'd assume it would have been as omnipresent assistant as in "Her" movie (without negative impact of course) but see where we are today: I am still using it for only weather and setting alarms and even in that it sometimes works and sometimes does not.

buryat 2y ago

Inventions are pretty cheap without the refinement of the product that directly contributes to the customers' demand additionally backed by robust supply chains and delivery of cutting edge tech like the M-line up of chips, and the tremendous camera quality, battery life, reliability of the operating system, specially curated app store, security and privacy, etc. Inventions are not what people want to pay for, people want to pay for additional value added in all sorts of form. Apple creates products for humans and people pay back by seeing the offering as a higher valued product.

robenkleene 2y ago

I think what Apple excels at is providing a set of software development tools, a platform, and an audience, for third-party developers to then use to build innovative products, the best of which either become platforms of their own if they're lucky (e.g., Adobe suite), or are copied by Apple and made part of their operating systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)). In addition to Watson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson), there's also Cover Flow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Flow), Shortcuts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortcuts_(Apple) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortcuts_(Apple)), Konfabulator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Widgets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Widgets), Growl (https://growl.github.io/growl/ https://growl.github.io/growl/), and of course my favorite LaunchBar (https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html, LaunchBar would be my pick as the most innovative app of the last 25 years), for apps that were incorporated into macOS. While Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Lightroom, Premiere, and PowerPoint are all examples of software developed and released first for the Mac that then went on to become software behemoths in their own right (too big to Sherlock). (Well Sketch turned out differently, because Figma happened, but it's still a great example of third-party innovation facilitated by "a set of software development tools, a platform, and an audience".) The point here being I think of Apple as more providing a platform for innovation rather than innovating themselves (but I'm aware that's probably a minority opinion).

napierzaza 2y ago

[dead]

zelphirkalt 2y ago

Apple fans do this to justify their decision to buy Apple products to their circles and most of all, to themselves. Or it is just delusion from not actually knowing better.