History of ClarisWorks
Posted January 19th, 2003 @ 04:23pm by Erik J. Barzeski
I consider myself a fan of history. Not the dates and other stuff rotely memorized by high school and college peons, errr, students, but the stories, the people, the psychology of it all. I like to get beneath the history, and down to the people. Down to the nitty gritty. As this pertains to Apple, I like to know the code names to projects. I like knowing the story of Clarus the Dogcow. I'm your typical, average, mildly obsessed Mac user with a bent for "the inside story" and the "behind the scenes" look at life inside and around my favorite hardware vendor.
That having been said, and having read Owen Linzmayer's books a few times apiece, I found this Brief History of ClarisWorks a thoroughly entertaining and informative read. I am a big fan of AppleWorks, and ClarisWorks was one of the original "I got it!" applications for both myself and many of my friends. After all, I even taught my mom how to use it, and I remember running out of memory when painting on an LCIII quite frequently. 🙂
AppleWorks has "languished" since version 4.0, but I have high hopes for version 7. Will it offer Excel/Word capabitilies beyond what we currently have? Full compatibility? Will it be rewritten in Cocoa? Will it ship by July?
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Posted 19 Jan 2003 at 7:29pm #
Brief History of Clarisworks
Thanks to Erik for pointing me towards Bob Hearn's Brief History of Clarisworks.
Makes fascinating reading for all those bazillions of people who remember using CW 1.0 on a Color Classic or an LC machine. Ah, the good old days.
Posted 19 Jan 2003 at 7:32pm #
Be interesting to see what happens with AppleWorks now that Concurr.., I mean, Keynote is here.
I remember hearing that the reason the AW presentation module limited you to 640x480 slides was because MS insisted on it. Not sure if there's any truth to that (or indeed if AW does impose such a limitation; never used the prezo part of it), but if so then Keynote is an even more interesting move.
Let's all say a brief prayer before bedtime that AW's Cocoa rewrite has been in the works for the last 18 months.
Posted 21 Jan 2003 at 1:46am #
my favorite "mac insider" book is still "the macintosh reader" by doug clapp. i picked it up at a bookstore in '92 or '93, and have read it countless times ... really neat stories from the mac's earliest days up to what was then current (system 7!) ... i always hear about linzmyer's books, but never about the mac reader ... dunno why.