| I wrote one of the chapters in Digital Deli (https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programm...), in a computing world that bears little resemblance to the present. Am I exaggerating? You decide. I wrote a popular program for the Apple II (Apple Writer). International best-seller, translated into five languages. It was a word processor that included a macro language. Are you sitting down? Hand-coded in assembly language, my program ran in eight kilobytes of memory. That left 24 kilobytes for a document, on a computer with 32 kilobytes of RAM. In the present, I watch my GPU complain that it's run out of VRAM, and I lament that I only have 24 gigabytes available. That's a million times more memory than the Apple Writer document size, but hey -- not enough. Over a span of just 36 years. One more story. In the early 1980s, Tom Clancy (Hunt for Red October) called me and asked how to recover content from a disk his computer couldn't read any more. It was a full chapter of his Red October book project, written on Apple Writer. I said, "Use your backup disk." Clancy replied, "What's a backup disk?" True story. |
I used Apple Writer in on Apple II machines in my public library in the 80s. I can't say I remember a ton about it but it's definitely a name I remember. I remember using AppleWorks on the machines at school, but I liked Apple Writer better and lamented that I wasn't permitted to use it at school (because the teacher said she wasn't familiar with it and couldn't help me if I had problems).