What a journey down memory lane. I have more than one long-standing client who had substantial investments in data drawn on Mark Cutter's MacDraw program, including some data files going back to 1985 (a year after the Mac release). The collaboration and ease of use between MacDraw and MacPaint files into MacWrite documents is something those clients wish they still had today - current offerings from Microsoft Office, Adobe and Google Drive do not even come close in terms of personal productivity. I remember when the only programs you could get on Mac were MacDraw, MacPaint, MacWrite and Multiplan (Microsoft's take on VisiCalc, to one day become Excel).
Needless to say, many of those documents found their upgrade path into ClarisWorks then AppleWorks. iWorks seemed to be a misadventure, but upon the end of life of AppleWorks, a portion of those drawing files were converted by EazyDraw Retro offered by Dave Mattson and Dekorra Optics and today still breathe life in version 10.7.4 of EazyDraw.
It is sobering and inspiring to see business continuity with data files whose information persists after 37 years following a surprisingly seamless upgrade journey. Kudos to all the programmers and entrepreneurs who made that possible.
> The collaboration and ease of use between MacDraw and MacPaint files into MacWrite documents is something those clients wish they still had today - current offerings from Microsoft Office, Adobe and Google Drive do not even come close in terms of personal productivity.
The most important thing about any tool in personal productivity IMO is whether the tool gets used in the first place.
Back in '84 I had the great privilege of being National Accounts Manager representing Apple in New Zealand. I remember participating in an expo at the Winter Show Buildings on Hutchison Road in Wellington where we laid out a number of tables with 128k Macintosh computers replete with mouse and keyboard (not unlike today's Apple Stores). You need to understand, this was in an age where absolutely no-one (especially in NZ) had ever seen a mouse let alone a bit-mapped graphical screen. Computers simply were not that immediate to use.
Just like today Apple was encouraging the public to get their hands on them and try them out. What stands out in my own memory is the number of parents who were telling their children "DO NOT TOUCH" and those kids who went ahead and sat down anyway. Watching young children draw their first picture ever on a computer truly blew my mind. THAT level of approachability and immediacy has been lost with so much software, even on smart phones.
One of the impressive measurements of productivity over the next decades was the average number of applications a Mac user used compared with the burgeoning Windows systems. It is the tools that actually get used that define productivity.
I left NZ a few years later. My clients in the US and elsewhere were primarily entrepreneurs who had championed their own mastery of personal productivity tools, be it Nashoba's FileMaker or the MacDraw, MacPaint, MacWrite and Multiplan tools. They did not need me to do that. The tools were simply usable. They built businesses using those tools themselves without any background in computer science (what was that?) or even business administration. Once their businesses exploded with growth, they needed more people, they needed to delegate and I became their technologist. Every one of them to this day laments to me that they couldn't even begin to sit down with PhotoShop or Illustrator or MySQL or the rest and repeat what they began.
Of course the most accessible of today's software tools are iOS/Android apps, but I have yet to see one get used by a young person to build the information system of a startup business. Today we need an IT department with programmers to meet the most basic of business requirements. Indeed it is 2022 and unbelievably there is not a single simple application on which one can run a business. An application with integrated accounting, contact management, and all activities - email, VoIP, scheduling, project management. "I want to look at all my customers that bought this product over the last 2 years with whom I have had email correspondence and send them an illustrated email about our follow-on product when its development reaches the next project milestone." Information is less integrated than you might think.
What has happened instead over my lifetime is that new technologies emerge and replace the old technologies but not with greater productivity, just with new paradigms. The Mac itself was an example of that. When it was released, the Apple II had considerably more hardware devoted to productivity software, as the graphical user interface gobbled up much of the Mac's 128k RAM. Fast forward to the 2007 4GB iPhone (yeah 4 GB) and the same thing happened. Just enough hardware to run the most rudimentary of apps, but oh my goodness what a sexy experience. I'm sure this will continue with the next generation of hardware (maybe floating in our Ray Kurzweilian bloodstream) - not enough hardware to do much of anything useful at first other than maybe connect with the cloud.
At the beginning of the personal computing revolution, I felt the overwhelming promise was one of the most intimate accessibility of unlimited personal productivity. That was the attractor. Today I'm not so sure we have that, and I am positive that fewer and fewer entrepreneurs are able to get their arms around 100% of their technology requirements. They might be really good at writing fully documented business plans, but they will need someone else to do the bookkeeping. Oh and someone else to do their web presence - maybe even a separate front-end person and a back-end person. And yeah we'll get that influencer to do our social. WTF!
I believe through and through that the accessibility of technology does not have to diverge as its capability increases.
Not the OP, but I think there's something in what they're saying. Technically, you can get close to the embedding that the Claris apps used to support with Word/Excel (although there's no separate vector/bitmap tools with the same integration). You even get something akin to System 7's Publish+Subscribe with Office.
At the same time, it feels a lot more fragile now, because the support is coming from Microsoft, it's not as baked into the platform as it was. The OG Mac did a lot of work to support a document paradigm – with features like aliases, stationary pads, publish+subscribe, solid drag+drop and clipboard, spatial Finder, etc. Even where these persist in OS X they're shadows of their past selves.
By the time you get to iOS the document paradigm is entirely gone, and you're dealing with app siloes which are ridiculously hard to bridge across. The web, even Google Docs, is similarly focused on the tool, not the output.
I'm not sure which paradigm is "better", to be honest. If you take the original document paradigm to its conclusion you end up with OpenDoc, which even if you make allowances for attempting it on underpowered 90s platforms, was probably the wrong direction. But the app paradigm makes composable workflows like OP describes in a sibling comment very difficult or impossible to achieve.
Back in the day, at this stage on the Mac, there was a universality to the data exchange.
The Mac had, among other things, four core data types: text, rich text, bitmap, and PICT.
PICT was an object based drawing (lines, circles, boxes), in contrast to a bitmap.
My memory is vague on Multiplan (I used it at the time, as a spreadsheet). But there was another program called MacChart. Either Multiplan didn't support charting (seems unlikely), or I was simply blind to it.
But, consider this simple workflow: Enter numbers into Multiplan, with all its calculating fun. Copy the column of numbers, hit Cmd-] (I think it was on Switcher), and now you're in MacChart. Paste that column, and you get your instant Pie chart, or Bar chart. Hit Copy again, Cmd-] again to MacDraw, and paste that chart in to MacDraw. Add your lines, labels, whatever you wanted to do to doctor the chart up that MacChart didn't do. All the elements of the chart are editable. The wedges, the rectangles, lines and axis, text etc. Copy again, CMD-], now you're in MacWrite. Paste it in there in the middle of your text. Add the "Figure 1", hit the "Center" button, print it on the LaserWriter, at full resolution (vs a 72 DPI bitmap on a 300 DPI printer). Back then we'd admonish folks that were using space to line up text in MacWrite or MacDraw, as it did not line up properly when printer on the LaserWriter. The ImageWriter was WYSIWYG, but the LaserWriter had more WYGIWIGY (What You Get Is What I Gives You). So, you instead should use ruler tabs and what not, vs the space character.
MacChart took rows of text and charted them. (The calculator desk accessory would sum a column of numbers if you pasted it in to it.) The results of the Multiplan calculations. MacDraw was, essentially, a PICT editor. I don't know if it stored PICTs, but it certainly worked with them as native. And then you stomped them into your MacWrite document.
If you pasted them in to MacPaint, then, boom, it's a bitmap, and you can do all your bitmappy things to it (one way trip, the PICT is lost).
Combined with Switcher (this was pre-Multifinder), at the time, not only was this an extraordinary demo (yea, it was a jaw dropping demo), it was an extraordinary reality. It WORKED!
I spent a lot of time doing this, making slides (printed on transparencies on the LaserWriter). I was on loan to this other group in the company, the manager tried to hire me away because of my l33t Chart and Draw skillz.
I don't know today if I pasted some graphics from Mac Keynote into MS Powerpoint if the it would go over as separate objects or what. I remember trying to paste some graphics from Visio into Powerpoint and it spit up its lunch. It certainly did not Just Work. I was aghast that these two MS products did not seamlessly work together (yes, I know they bought Visio...but, still...).
It's hard to convey how simple this all was. How it all "just worked", with no surprises. On this tiny little beige box with a 9" screen that "nobody considered as a serious computer".
Those few clipboard types where pretty universally respected and it let tools "do one thing well". Switcher let you stitch them together.
ClarisWorks was an amazingly easy way to ween tech illiterate people into a tech workspace.
I’ve seen a required tech course for education majors take people who literally did not know how to use a mouse from zero ability to being able to develop a variety of quite good multimedia projects using ClarisWorks.
As a TPM, I actually use ClarisWorks 4.0 (in SheepShaver) in drawing mode when running retros on one of my teams (iOS). Originally did it as a joke a couple of months ago but ended up sticking with it since it is lightning fast and works just as well as any modern tool for that purpose.
I keep hoping that someone creates something akin to WINE for Classic Mac apps, or at least something analogous to the Classic mode that shipped with OS X from versions 10.0 through 10.5. Sheepshaver and qemu-ppc are nice but a WINE-like or Classic-like would really push things to the next level for making frequent use of old Mac apps practical.
As a kid born in the early 80s that grew up on Macintosh, I used Claris a lot at home and at school. One of my earliest "ah-ha!" moments was when my dad taught me about copy-paste in a word processor. That you could "copy" some text and just "paste" it anywhere without having to re-type it was an amazing capability.
ClarisWorks, Aldus SuperPaint, Rapmaster[0], Zippy[1], and so many more, were fixtures of my geeky youth.
Bob Hearn here. Thank you all! Strange to realize it's been 19 years since I wrote that history, which at the time was 12 years after ClarisWorks 1.0 shipped.
Used ClarisWorks all the way through medical school. Your software made a presentation on Rh incompatibility in pregnancy easy on my PowerBook 1400. The presentation is still there on the hard disk.
That’s super interesting because it was written while they still existed and BeOS could have a future. But even then they weren’t sure about Be but proceeded anyway.
Gotta love the passion for the OS. As megacorps unify all of technology, I feel like this passion and rooting for an underdog is getting lost. Perhaps that’s just the market and technology maturing and solving peoples needs. Yet the nerd in me loves the idea of writing for an obscure platform simply for the enjoyment of it.
For some reason things seemed more possible back then for other platforms. Maybe it was just the afterglow of the personal computer era of the 80s? The Gobe team took a risk, I took a risk with my video editor and a many other teams dove into making apps for BeOS knowing it was a gamble. We were all also much younger, but in general the environment seemed more open. I should emphasis "seemed" as Microsoft came along and made life very hard for Be and Eazel and I am sure others who tried to get their operating systems onto PC hardware.
This is a great story and it brought back some good memories. I was in Portland, OR at the time and my wife had started the PDX Bug BeOS users group. We had Bruce, Carl and Scott over for a demo of Gobe Productive and it blew everyone away.
Both my wife and I ended up working for Be and moving down to Silicon Valley. I would drive by the Claris wedge building on my way to run on the San Tomas Aquino trail and think about what could have been if things had worked out a bit differently.
I eventually ended up at Apple along with some of the Gobe team and a lot of people from Be. Good times!
What a great spin down memory lane. It makes me . . not angry, not really. Mostly sad.
I'm very much neck deep in the world of publishing software, and one of the great mysteries is how the quality and functionality of all the tools in this ecosystem have followed, at best, a flat line, at worst they've broken through the basement floor. 2/3rd of Word functionality circa 2003 just vanished, replaced by who knows what. They somehow made ordered lists opaque. Nice work, lads.
XML publishing . . I can't even talk about this garbage fire. XML vendors. In most vocabularies nothing more than a cackle of cash vampires, each one a giant "Industry Standard" software purchase that goes nowhere for half a decade, while the rank and file keep using Paint and Word. Then management closes it up and starts all over. There's a few exceptions I can count off on one hand, and most of those are completely customized for a specific program, never again to see light of day.
Luckily users aren't idiots, and this general trajectory in DTP has fueled the revolution in lightweight markup. I am a cynical but willing participant. Asciidoc core supports transclusion, partial transclusion, and conditional content without extensions or out of the box crap, the Power Trio that writers everywhere have driven through hell and high water to find. Borrowing some linters and other developer tools, you get all the XML functionality for nothing at all. And the thing works, for free, with normal software. So people can spend their time thinking about shit that matters, like maintainability, level of repair, root cause analysis.
But sometimes that's a little too scary for a lot of people. Usually writers get sucked back in by some shyster from Official Software for Industry, and oh boy here we go again. Spoiler: there IS NO INDUSTRY STANDARD. It's MADE UP. Each one is going to be customized out the wazoo for your business - it's natural language, there is no getting around that. Also, before you blow a truckload on integration you MIGHT WANT TO CHECK IF THERE IS ANYTHING TO INTEGRATE WITH.
Cripes. I think I sprained something writing that.
I got an offer to jump into front end development and I am thinking pretty hard about making that jump. This whole business is a scam, or, worse, just thirty years of people wasting their entire goddamn lives moving angle brackets around.
I was an intern at Claris the summer before the entire team quit. I went back to college at University of Washington and entered the CS department.
Then, three months later, I got a call from my manager who said "hey, would you consider doing a co-op for nine months to help us ship the next version of Claris?"
I looooved ClarisWorks. Sometime in the early 1990s I got a call from my cousin. He was doing a shoot on location at a LensCrafters in Manhasset NY and they wanted a shot of customer info being filled out on a computer screen which then resulted in glasses being ready in ‘about an hour’. They had nothing on hand that could do that. So I packed up my Mac IIsi, brought it down to the LensCrafters on Northern Boulevard and set it up. ClarisWorks database had a feature that would flip through records one at a time. So I sat there filling in one letter at a time of a fake clients name et voila! Animated customer entry filmed off the screen. I still remember the red type on black background in serpentine font.
Tangential but funny: I fondly remember the Jerky Boys prank call of ClarisWorks tech support, where they said something like “they did a full, clean, custom install on me” when describing how they were allegedly abused by someone using ClarisWorks install media.
That was an exciting time I remember vividly. This history filled in virtually all of my questions about the confusing history of Apple works and Claris works. Scratched a 30 year old itch.
Needless to say, many of those documents found their upgrade path into ClarisWorks then AppleWorks. iWorks seemed to be a misadventure, but upon the end of life of AppleWorks, a portion of those drawing files were converted by EazyDraw Retro offered by Dave Mattson and Dekorra Optics and today still breathe life in version 10.7.4 of EazyDraw.
It is sobering and inspiring to see business continuity with data files whose information persists after 37 years following a surprisingly seamless upgrade journey. Kudos to all the programmers and entrepreneurs who made that possible.