FullWrite Professional
Encyclopedia
Word processor
A word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
application for the Apple Macintosh, released in late 1988 by Ashton-Tate
Ashton-Tate
Ashton-Tate was a US based software company best known for developing the popular dBASE database application. Ashton-Tate grew from a small garage-based company to become a multinational corporation...
. Though it was released a year later than promised and had a number of problems, it developed a faithful following and some amount of commercial success. It was particularly well-liked for its excellent outliner, and its ability to create and organize complete book-length documents.
Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams
Douglas Noel Adams was an English writer and dramatist. He is best known as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which started life in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a "trilogy" of five books that sold over 15 million copies in his lifetime, a television...
used FullWrite as his primary word processor for some time. Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics...
published several of his books directly from FullWrite, notably Le Ton beau de Marot
Le Ton beau de Marot
Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language , published by Basic Books in 1997, is a book by Douglas Hofstadter in which he explores the meaning, strengths, failings, and beauty of translation....
. Since 1998, the product has been available as freeware
Freeware
Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
.
Genesis
The product started life at a small company, Ann Arbor Softworks, publishers of the earlier FullPaintFullPaint
FullPaint was a software program for the Apple Macintosh for graphics creation. It was developed by Ann Arbor Softworks and was sold as a more powerful alternative to Apple's MacPaint...
. Among a myriad of programs that were more or less direct clones of MacPaint, FullPaint was one of the first that really differentiated itself and was successful in the market. The company opened a sales office and changed their official address to Newbury Park, CA, although most of the company, notably development, remained in Ann Arbor, MI.
Looking for a new product when FullPaint was maturing, the team eventually decided on a word processor. They then started an in-depth study of what features a new product should have, hoping to make the one perfect program.
One of the primary "selling features" of their new word processor was a well-integrated outliner
Outliner
An outliner is a computer program that allows text to be organized into discrete sections that are related in a tree structure or hierarchy. Text may be collapsed into a node, or expanded and edited....
. At the time, outliners were extremely popular, and many felt they were ushering in an entirely new way of creating documents. FullWrite's implementation was particularly well received. An entire document could be a single outline, even across multiple chapters, or a document could contain many independent outlines. Each outline item had a header and a body, and either or both could be included in the visible document. This meant that, unlike most systems, the outline item headers did not have to be part of the document so they could be used purely for organizational purposes. Alternatively, the outline item bodies could be used for notes that were not normally part of the printed document. Users could also attach notes to the outline headers, to remind themselves what to put into that section when they came back to it later. FullWrite continues to appear in discussions about outliners today. Also notable was its ability to completely wrap text tightly around embedded graphics and its integrated drawing environment, both unique features for word processors at that time.
FullWrite was the first completely WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
word processor that showed complete pages as they would appear on the printer. This feature is now standard in most word processors, although often accessed in a very modal way. FullWrite also included a number of advanced layout features, such as user-adjustable kerning
Kerning
In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning is the adjustment of the space between individual letter forms vs. tracking which is the uniform adjustment of spacing applied over a...
, automatic hyphenation, flow around irregular shapes (pictures), and sticky notes that allowed authors to place comments within the document. Text could be marked for inclusion in footnotes/endnotes, the table of contents or an index, all of which were automatically maintained. FullWrite also featured change bars, allowing users to track changes to the documents. Most of these features have since appeared on other high-end products, but at the time FullWrite was considerably more advanced than any competing products on the market.
Development
These features came at a price: time-to-market. Development started in April 1986 and pre-release advertising was launched in December to announce it would be released in January 1987 at a price around $300. It was first shown to the public at MacWorld Expo in January 1987 with the promise that it wold be released later that year. The date continued to be pushed further back. In March Computer Reseller News reported it was being readied for April, but by August MacWEEKMacWEEK
MacWEEK was a controlled-circulation weekly Apple Macintosh trade journal based in San Francisco founded by Michael Tchong, John Anderson , Glenn Patch, Dick Govatski and Michael F. Billings. It featured a back-page rumor column penned by the pseudonymous Mac the Knife.Founded in 1987, it was...
reported it to be "a month away" while a November issue claimed that the documentation was complete but the program was not.
By this point, the product had become something of a joke in the Mac world, winning numerous (unofficial) vaporware
Vaporware
Vaporware is a term in the computer industry that describes a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is never actually released nor officially canceled. Vaporware is also a term sometimes used to describe events that are announced or predicted,...
awards. Microsoft released Word 3.0 in 1987, and Ann Arbor responded by taking out a two-page advertisement headlined DON'T BUY IT, stating that FullWrite was "a superior word processor, at a better price ... at your store within 60 days". This too turned out to be rather optimistic.
Just prior to the January 1988 MacWorld Expo, where the company planned to ship the product, Ann Arbor was purchased by Ashton-Tate, with whom discussions had been underway for some time. The acquisition was kept a secret and, instead of shipping, the company gave away 10,000 copies of the current beta version to drum up some buzz. This version contained an easter egg which would convert selected text into pig Latin
Pig Latin
Pig Latin is a language game of alterations played in English. To form the Pig Latin form of an English word the first consonant is moved to the end of the word and an ay is affixed . The object is to conceal the meaning of the words from others not familiar with the rules...
if the user held down the right keys. The demo version of FullWrite completely filled a floppy disk, and FullWrite would crash if it did not have disk space available. Therefore when potential customers launched the program directly off of the floppy (which was full), the program would crash. Ashton-Tate made tens of thousands of these demo disks, and was converting less than .1% of them to actual sales.
Shipping
After minor edits to change the copyright notices and packaging, the program finally shipped as version 1.1 on 27 April 1988, at a suggested retail price of $395.Reviews of FullWrite were generally positive, although they noted a number of bugs and generally slow performance. One reviewer found that a fast typist could outtype the editor on even a reasonably fast machine like the SE/30
Macintosh SE/30
The Macintosh SE/30 is a personal computer that was designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1989 until 1991. It was the fastest and most expandable of the original black-and-white compact Macintosh series....
. A more serious problem was that the program needed 1 MB of RAM to work at all, and 2 MB and a hard drive
Hard disk
A hard disk drive is a non-volatile, random access digital magnetic data storage device. It features rotating rigid platters on a motor-driven spindle within a protective enclosure. Data is magnetically read from and written to the platter by read/write heads that float on a film of air above the...
to work comfortably. This was at a time when most new Macs shipped with 1 MB and used floppies for storage, and when users were starting to take advantage of the multitasking
Multitasking
Multitasking may refer to any of the following:*Computer multitasking - the apparent simultaneous performance of two or more tasks by a computer's central processing unit...
features offered by System 6's MultiFinder
MultiFinder
MultiFinder was the name of an extension software for the Apple Macintosh, introduced on August 11, 1987 and included with System Software 5. It added the ability to co-operatively multitask between several applications at once – a great improvement over the previous systems, which could only...
. To make matters worse, Ashton-Tate downplayed the amount of memory required rather than admitting how much was really needed. This may have been the Achilles' heel
Achilles' heel
An Achilles’ heel is a deadly weakness in spite of overall strength, that can actually or potentially lead to downfall. While the mythological origin refers to a physical vulnerability, metaphorical references to other attributes or qualities that can lead to downfall are common.- Origin :In Greek...
of the product, seriously limiting its marketplace and resulting in frustrated users.
The only notable outright missing feature was that the program did not include a built-in table editor – particularly odd when considering that FullWrite did include a simple MacDraw
MacDraw
MacDraw was a vector based drawing application released along with the first Apple Macintosh systems in 1984. MacDraw was one of the first WYSIWYG drawing programs that could be used in collaboration with MacWrite. MacDraw was useful for drawing technical diagrams and floorplans...
-like illustration module built-in. Many reviews also found the interface confusing and difficult to learn, a problem that was not helped by the fact that the "Learning" manual was just a rearranged copy of the reference manual.
Nevertheless the product managed to gather a loyal, if small, following. For those users with machines capable of running it, it delivered on its promise of power with a Mac interface. It was perhaps the first program on the Mac that could be used to write large documents and books, something the excellent outliner helped with enormously.
The program managed to provide most word-processing features, but it was in need of additional cleanup and attention to performance and memory footprint. Ashton-Tate, however, never addressed these issues. Three minor versions were released in 1989 and 1990: 1.5, and 1.5s. These fixed many bugs and some minor features, and 1.5s added a rarely-used ability to add sound notes to documents (thus the "s" version). They also bundled an external product known as Tycho TableMaker to address that hole, but it was not well integrated, as one might expect from an external program. Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...
released a major upgrade in 1988, 4.0, and Ashton-Tate never responded.
After 1990 the product was at a standstill. During this time Ashton-Tate's cash cow
Cash cow
In business, a cash cow is a product or a business unit that generates unusually high profit margins: so high that it is responsible for a large amount of a company's operating profit...
, dBASE
DBASE
dBase II was the first widely used database management system for microcomputers. It was originally published by Ashton-Tate for CP/M, and later on ported to the Apple II and IBM PC under DOS...
, was performing poorly in the market. dBASE IV for IBM PC compatible
IBM PC compatible
IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to...
s was released the same year as FullWrite and customers were abandoning it for the various dBASE clones
Clone (computer science)
In computing, a clone is a hardware or software system that is designed to mimic another system. Compatibility with the original system is usually the explicit purpose of cloning hardware or low-level software such as operating systems...
like FoxPro
FoxPro
' has two meanings:*Visual FoxPro, an object-oriented programming language and RDBMS, published by Microsoft, for Microsoft Windows*FoxPro 2, a text-based procedural programming language and DBMS, originally published by Fox Software and later by Microsoft, for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Macintosh,...
and Clipper
Clipper programming language
Clipper is a computer programming language that is used to create software programs that originally operated primarily under DOS. Although it is a powerful general-purpose programming language, it was primarily used to create database/business programs....
. By 1990 Ashton-Tate was in serious financial trouble, and was eventually purchased by Borland
Borland
Borland Software Corporation is a software company first headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, Cupertino, California and finally Austin, Texas. It is now a Micro Focus subsidiary. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.-The 1980s:...
in 1991.
Work was underway on a cross-platform version of FullWrite, but Borland's purchase effectively ended all Mac development. In response, Ann Arbor Softworks (which still existed to serve customers of its other products) sued Borland, complaining that Ashton-Tate had failed to market the program successfully. The suit was dismissed, and analysts noted that had it gone forward, Borland and other large companies would be open to copy-cat suits from any disgruntled former developer.
Continued development
In late 1993 Borland sold off the product to Akimbo Systems, a small company started by Roy Leban, one of FullWrite's original developers. Akimbo immediately patchPatch (computing)
A patch is a piece of software designed to fix problems with, or update a computer program or its supporting data. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, and improving the usability or performance...
ed it to work on System 7
System 7 (Macintosh)
System 7 is a single-user graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers. It was introduced on May 13, 1991 by Apple Computer. It succeeded System 6, and was the main Macintosh operating system until it was succeeded by Mac OS 8 in 1997...
, the latest Macintosh operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
at the time, and they released it as 1.7.
A greatly updated FullWrite 2.0 (dropping "Professional") followed early in 1995, adding a number of new features including AppleScript
AppleScript
AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. and built into Macintosh operating systems since System 7. The term "AppleScript" may refer to the scripting system itself, or to particular scripts that are written in the AppleScript language....
ing, importers/exporters based on Claris
Claris
Claris was a computer software developer formed as a spin-off from Apple Computer in 1987. It was given the source code and copyrights to several programs that were owned by Apple, notably MacWrite and MacPaint, in order to separate Apple's application software activities from its hardware and...
's XTND
XTND
XTND was a document import/export system developed by Claris for their products on the Apple Macintosh. Products supporting XTND placed an additional popup menu in the open and save dialogs, allowing users to read and write documents from any supported format...
, a built-in table editor, an extensive and powerful plug-in architecture (including a pig Latin plug-in), and support for the "EGO Protocol" which used AppleEvents to allow in-place editing of graphics. The most important "upgrade" was a major effort concentrating on performance and memory footprint, which was reduced by about 500 kb, allowing it to run somewhat smoothly in only 700 kb. Reviews were very positive; now the main concerns were the odd menu layout that made some commands difficult to find, and the lack of a cascading style system.
The new version was fairly well received, but by this time, Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...
's stranglehold on the Mac market was complete. Akimbo re-used the layout engine to produce a new HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
-editing tool known as Globetrotter Web Publisher, designed to allow people who did not know HTML to publish complete web sites, but it gained only a scant following. After several years of small sales, Akimbo decided to release FullWrite 2.0.6 as freeware
Freeware
Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
in 1998 when the company shut down. Globetrotter was not similarly released because of its use of the GIF
GIF
The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability....
patent, for which Unisys
Unisys
Unisys Corporation , headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware, is a long established business whose core products now involves computing and networking.-History:...
insisted royalties be paid, even on free copies.
External links
- - complete "Toolbox" manual from the 1.5 release
- - source for Free version (v2.0.6), helpful tips for running in modern Macintosh systems, and conversion of legacy files into other document types.