New, 8/10/07: With the introduction of iWork '08 , which includes the new Numbers spreadsheet, it appears that ClarisWorks, aka AppleWorks, is finally dead. There has been no official cancellation announcement, but AppleWorks no longer shows up under the list of software titles on the online Apple Store, and perhaps more significantly, now redirects to . Active development on AppleWorks evidently ceased some years ago, but the program continued to be sold.
Prehistory: StyleWare Claris, Part I On Our Own Claris, Part II Oregon Whither ClarisWorks? Reader Feedback
Background This page is about the history of ClarisWorks (now called AppleWorks ). ClarisWorks was one of the most popular Macintosh programs of all time, with over 20 million active users at one point. If you haven't heard of it, you will likely not find this page particularly interesting! A lot of the material here is rapidly becoming ancient history; I thought I had better set down as many recollections as I could, before everybody forgets ClarisWorks completely.
There seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding the relationship of the various programs named AppleWorks and ClarisWorks. This is not helped by the fact that Apple renamed ClarisWorks to AppleWorks a couple of years ago. In fact, there have been three completely different programs known as AppleWorks. This history is not about the first one, which was a text-based program for the Apple II.
People also seem to confuse Claris the company and ClarisWorks the program. In fact, Claris was around long before ClarisWorks, as explained below.
It all started with a little software company in Houston called StyleWare, run by Kevin Harvey. StyleWare made Apple II software (MultiScribe). In 1986, Apple introduced what looked to be an interesting new computer: the Apple II GS . It was an Apple II that acted like a Mac! StyleWare hired a bunch of computer science students from Rice University to write software for this new machine. Among them were myself, Jeff Erickson , Scott Holdaway , Scott Lindsey, Tom Hoke, Mike Hibbetts, and Syd Polk . (This was a natural job for me - I had been an Apple enthusiast and programmer since 1977, when I got my first Apple II .) Jeff and I wrote TopDraw 1 , which was like MacDraw. Originally to be called ColorDraw, TopDraw was the first color object-oriented drawing program for a Mac-style graphical user interface. The Mac II had not yet arrived; Macs were black and white.
Meanwhile, Apple had formed a software subsidiary, named Claris, to develop and market application software. Initially Claris sold MacWrite, MacPaint, and MacDraw, for the Macintosh, and AppleWorks, for the Apple II. (The original plan was that Claris would become completely independent from Apple someday, and go public. But that never happened.)
By late 1988, AppleWorks GS was ready to ship. Well, ready or not, it was shipped 2 . The plan at this point had been to reorganize the StyleWare team around a project to write an integrated application for the Macintosh. This would compete against Microsoft Works - a daunting prospect, even in 1988. Apparently Claris decided it was too daunting; after we finished AppleWorks GS, the plan was changed. The StyleWare programmers were distributed throughout the other Mac projects. Scott Holdaway wound up on the MacWrite II team; I was on the MacDraw II team 3 .
In spite of the change of plans, Claris was in many ways a great place to be. It had inherited some Apple culture, which appealed to me, and there was a strong sense that we were creating the best, cleanest software out there. Years later I realized that this feeling had led to a certain blindness to the pace at which the rest of the industry was moving. In its effort to produce slick, bug-free software, Claris was neglecting the hard reality that sheer number of features sells, independent of elegance of design. Some products, such as MacWrite Pro, were delayed so long by string
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