AppleWorks on the Apple II
Dig, if you will, a picture. It's November 1983 and throngs of people are engaged in literal fisticuffs, " dozens of people were injured, some even hospitalized ," to claim the last homely, pug-nosed Cabbage Patch Kid from the local Zayre's for Christmas shopping. In video footage, a store manager climbs a display, brandishing a baseball bat, trying to will order onto the chaos. The riots make the local, then national news, and eventually have a page on Wikipedia . It's a striking exclamation mark to punctuate 1983, with dark implications for the coming new year. Had we sunk so low? Then, at the start of December, a Christmas miracle. The hottest pop star in the world released one of the most influential music videos of all time on MTV. You know the one, where Michael turns into a werewolf, but then he's a zombie, and they do that dance, and the electronic beat "ur URRR adugga dugga dugga dugga dugga dug ur URRR adugga dugga dugga dugga dugga dug", and the Vincent Price laugh, and those crazy eyes at the end. The video for "Thriller" released simultaneous to the riots, and karmic balance was restored. Huzzah! Maybe 1984 wouldn't be so bad after all. 1984 wasn't just "not bad," it was radical. I tried to find "cutest adorable chubby-cheeked preschoolers Thriller dance" but this will do. Pop-culture nerds, in particular, would gorge themselves that year with Ghostbusters , The Terminator , Gremlins , Nightmare on Elm Street , Beverly Hills Cop , Revenge of the Nerds , Splash , Red Dawn , The NeverEnding Story , The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai , Lynch's Dune , Karate Kid , Repo Man, This is Spinal Tap , Sixteen Candles , The Transformers toys and show, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic, Stop Making Sense concert film, Prince's Purple Rain , Do They Know It's Christmas? , Neuromancer , Elite , Karateka , King's Quest , the Soviet boycott of the Olympics , and the first MTV Video Music Awards. "Thriller" lost "Video of the Year" to "You Might Think", but did win "Best Choreography" and "Viewer's Choice." Oh, and Apple aired a commercial during Super Bowl XVIII. You know the one, with the skinheads in grey, and the oppressive fascism, and the woman in red shorts, and the sledgehammer, and that electronic siren "BEE oooh.... BEE oooh", and "1984 won't be like 1984." Apple introduced the Macintosh, a system Steve Jobs said was so easy to learn, "You can sit your grandmother in front of this computer and she’ll figure out how it works." That's an interesting way to describe a computer that internal documentation shows "we will not attempt to position the product in any way as a 'home' computer." Meanwhile, that same year, the Apple II series sold another one million units while Apple was taking its third stab at obsoleting those machines. Having shrugged off the Apple III, then the Lisa, Apple II fans would be forgiven for looking at the Macintosh's anemic launch software library (essentially just MacWrite and MacPaint ) and shrugging in agreement with Clara Peller's 1984 catch-phrase, "Where's the beef?" Tom Weishaar, writing for Open-Apple newsletter in July 1985 (a rough year for Apple), "For six years now Apple's management has been trying to build a computer better than the Apple II. In all these years, after all this money, only the Apple II has ever shown a profit. Buyers are looking for tools they can use. The Apple II has plenty of power to be useful." VisiCalc was early, clear proof that innovation isn't measured in megahertz. By 1984, developers had a lot of expertise in making the most of limited hardware. Look at the strides made in six years of software research on the Atari 2600, for example. Practice makes perfect. Rupert (later "Robert") Lissner heard the call. While the Macintosh was an interesting promise of a computing future that may or may not come to fruition, there were millions of Apple II owners with immediate needs. AppleWorks fulfilled those needs, growing a strong fanbase, spawning dedicated newsletters, lots of books, add-ons, and more. When Apple finally abandoned their 8-bit line, AppleWorks singlehandedly kept those machines productive for another decade . My only experience with AppleWorks was in the early OS X days, and that version had nothing to do with what we're looking at today. That and this only share a name; the Apple II version holds a legacy. Version 3 of AppleWorks was, according to a Compute! Magazine review, when the promise of "integration" finally paid off. Much of what AppleWorks 4 and 5 do, 3 can do with plug-ins. Version 3 is also when the program became Y2K compatible. It should be more than enough to develop a strong understanding of what made it such a favorite among the Apple II faithful. Thus far, I've only looked at one other "integrated" software package: Pipedream , on the Acorn Archimedes. It put forth the hypothesis that word processing, spreadsheets, and databases are not three separate applications, they are one and the same, chemically. While I was interested in its proposition, I was cool on its execution. It's an acquired taste. Where Pipedream blurred the line between applications, AppleWorks is very much three apps in one; a veritable turducken of productivity software. Maybe I'm a little unfair with that analogy. A turducken is a forced alliance of three fowl under, let's call it "extreme duress." AppleWorks, on the other hand, is a joyful alliance, with each individual app supporting the other two. I'd argue the word processing benefits the most, but to categorize this as merely three applications which happen to ship in one box, would miss the turkey for the duck. With 128KB of RAM and an entire suite of software loaded up, AppleWorks has 23KB remaining to do real work, as indicated by the memory counter in the bottom right of the screen. That's not a lot, but it's a bit dependent on how hardcore your work is. For example, my pre-edited text for this blog post hit 9,000 words and 43KB; the database merge (I'll talk about later) hit 24KB. Both are substantial projects, so if you're just dashing off letters, giving publishers a chance to get in the ground floor of your burgeoning career as the author of legally distinct James Bond-alike, James Epoxy, you'll be fine. Chronicling Agent Epoxy's actual adventures will likely require you to scope documents chapter-by-chapter. In the wake of the release of AppleWorks , a decent amount of third-party software was published to "add value" to this triple-threat. Using ad-hoc plug-in strategies (not originally part of the program proper), the already stuffed AppleWorks could become almost an operating system unto itself, hosting not just enhancements to the core functionality, but entirely new applications like screen savers and a MacPaint clone. Other companies took a less invasive approach to enhancing AppleWorks , offering pre-built documents ready for mail merge, recipes, phone directories, and the like. I saw a reference to a fantasy football management suite called FantasyWorks , but couldn't find any disk images for it. I suspect there's an entire world of unarchived AppleWorks enhancements sitting around on forgotten floppies. One product I did dig up, and which inspired my project for this investigation, promised to turn AppleWorks into HyperCard . When I learned of this program's existence, I had the reaction of a dog being asked, "Do you wanna go outside?" StoryWorks , written by Robert C. Moore and published by Teachers' Idea and Information Exchange, promises we can "create incredibly powerful 'hypertext' applications (stacks) (and) create 'knowledge base' stacks." That is a tall promise for an 8-bit machine, and it is one the provided example files don't quite live up to. What it can do is create "choose your own adventure" style stories. It takes a bit of boilerplate to adhere to StoryWorks's programming rules, and I will need to keep track of which "segments" (like HyperCard "cards") link to which. This sounds like perfect tasks for the database and spreadsheet to help manage. Then, I'll do some writing and formatting in the word processor, and next thing you know the potential and promise of AppleWorks's "integration" will be realized. Or so the theory goes. Navigating AppleWorks's file management can feel a little pre-Cambrian, not yet evolved into the complex, multicellular operating system you're reading this very blog within. Hardware-wise, we have the disk and the RAM. Files must be "on the desktop" to be used, which suggests some kind of "load from disk into RAM" step is necessary. That is precisely the case. First, we have to let AppleWorks know which disk is our "current disk," shown in the upper left corner of the "desktop" screen. It's akin to interfacing with a single folder in your file system, and the visual metaphor of tabbed folders is used to assist with navigating the Desktop. Once we have files on the desktop, fast switching via lets us bounce rapidly between documents making edits, while AppleWorks preserves our changes. Ready to quit? Not so fast, buddy. Sure AppleWorks appears to have preserved your work, but did you SAVE YOUR WORK ? Thus far, our changes are only committed to the Desktop and, as established when we loaded from disk into Desktop, the Desktop is not the disk. From the Desktop, we need to "Save Desktop files to disk" to really save onto disk. Earlier, I noted the "default folder" and here's where it will come into play. Saving work to disk will save everything to the default folder, regardless of its original position on disk. I wound up duplicating files into lots of fun, new locations on disk, rather than overwriting the originals, as I learned the program. But, at least my files are safe. They were saved carefully, after all. Two core tenets of AppleWorks 's approach to integration are its clipboard and keyboard shortcuts. Both work hard to bridge the natural divide between applications. The clipboard lets us move data between applications, and the keyboard shortcuts let us move muscle memory between applications. This mostly works, as when doing cut/copy/paste, text insertion/deletion, finding information, printing, and other relatively generic tools. The shared keyboard shortcuts fall apart, somewhat, in their overly ambitious attempt to enforce uniformity across all apps, even when they don't make intuitive sense. Let's look at the 'Zoom' command as a prime example. First, think about a command called 'Zoom' and envision what the result should be when invoked in a word processor context, then in a spreadsheet, and finally in a database. What did you picture in your mind's eye? What does it mean to 'Zoom'? Contrast that with to 'Find' text, which does exactly the same thing in all apps. Keyboard shortcuts aren't evenly distributed across modules, either. Printer options are available in the word processor and spreadsheet, but not the database. "Find" works across all modules, but "Replace" doesn't work in the spreadsheet. will split a window in a spreadsheet, ala VisiCalc's split window function. However, the word processor does not accept this command, though it would be a very reasonable expectation for that to work, as we saw in PaperClip on the Atari 8-bits. I certainly recognize that each program will necessarily have unique needs. However, I'm not convinced the mental fortitude required to remember how one command differs from application to application is any easier or harder than just learning a new keyboard command specific to each application. At this point, I've written thousands of words in AppleWorks and I can say confidently: the word processor is good. I have throttled the emulator to run at 1x speed, so I'm not completely head-in-the-sand about the reality of using the program on period equipment. Whatever horsepower I throw at it, it remains performant and a joy to type in. Of course, we have the usual list of modern gotchas, like the lack of international character input, and the printer-centric formatting options (which do not survive ASCII export). But the basic act of getting words on screen is smooth, along with minimal chrome which keeps us informed of the state of the writing environment. The chrome serves the document, ensuring the writer is never lost. The upper two lines show the ruler, what file we're working on, what mode we're in, and what hitting will do right now. In the above case, here in the Printer Options screen, will return me to the REVIEW/ADD/CHANGE screen. This clear explanation of what navigation buttons will do was something I appreciated about Bank Street Writer , and I'm happy to see a mature version of it in AppleWorks . The rule shows our tab stops and their respective styles, but doesn't show an indicator for the right margin. Editing tab stops is as easy as editing a line of text, thanks to fixed-width type. Just type a character for the tab styling you want at the place you want it, including centering and decimal alignment. The bottom displays a running line count and where the cursor currently sits. The bottom left has what seems like pretty useless information to me, "Type entry or use Apple commands." as a gentle reminder of how to use the program, I guess? The bottom right shows how to reach Help. That gives the UI four lines, with 20 devoted to writing. It is enough, though I do wish for a live word counter. AppleWorks 3 brings integrated spell check, with reviews of the time saying it is better than any of the third-party spell-checkers that preceded it. That's a strange note, because I find its usage convoluted. Invoked by , to "verify" the document, the "Options" it presents are obtuse and unintuitive, but all its asking is if we want to replace words one at a time or in a list, and do we want a post-verification summary of everything changed? If so, how do we want the summary presented, printed or on screen? The "Summary" is where we finally can see our word count, plus a list of all the weirdo words we used and how we corrected them individually, along with the occurrence count for each word. I'm not clear what I'm supposed to get out of knowing I used the word "turducken" 8 times. Maybe this is to help encourage the writer to mix things up? I refuse. As is typical of word processors of the day, a vast amount of the program's features are related to printer formatting and control. I do not own a printer, and "printing" to an ASCII file strips away most of the fun stuff, like bold and superscript. The spreadsheet portion is both amazing and boring. It's VisiCalc , with minor changes to meet the keyboard shortcuts (i.e. no slash menu command) and basic UI chrome of the suite. It does almost everything VisiCalc does, on a much larger worksheet and without quite as strict a memory barrier. If you have the RAM, even in this economy , you can eat VisiCalc's lunch. It also has many of the same frustrations as VisiCalc , including row-based vs. column-based calculation order, which can require a full document double-calculation to synchronize early formulas with later cell values. We're also stuck with the archaic (even by this time) "one column width for all cells," rather than per-column width adjustments. There are no graphing tools, and what options are available are so limited as to be effectively useless in a Lotus 1-2-3 world into which AppleWorks 3 was born; we'll need to rely on third party solutions to this problem. Copying complex formulas with relative cell references still requires manually selecting "relative" for every single reference in every single cell copied to a new position. Just a quick note to those cloning popular apps: you don't need to clone the terrible parts. Still, VisiCalc once turned the Apple II into a must-purchase investment and birthed an entirely new genre of business software. Now, that watershed event is collapsed into one subset of bullet points in a longer feature list on the back of the product packaging. The flat-file database module is uninspired, which is surprising to me because it is the module upon which this entire program was built. With a great word processor, and effectively a full clone of VisiCalc included, I expected similar depth from the database. Setting up fields and records, searching, sorting, and filtering, are all simple enough to accomplish. Its adherence to AppleWorks's common keyboard commands makes it pretty trivial to search for records, edit text, delete records, and print. Yet there is so much it doesn't do, I can't help but feel disappointed. To start, fields cannot be assigned value types, something even dBASE on CP/M could do years earlier. Everything is a string, without even the crudest form of data validation. AppleWorks 4 would gain the ability to at least set a field to be a number vs. text, though still no Booleans or field widths, for example. When setting up a contacts database, a common use case is to have a "notes" field to remember things like family members, follow-up discussion topics, and the like. Thanks to a limit of about 70 characters per field, no single field in AppleWorks can hold that much information. I guess the solution is to set up half a dozen "memo" fields, just in case? That kind of workaround feels quite silly to me. The remainder of the module is focused on generating "reports" and "layouts," the difference being "for printing" or "for screen." This has its place, perhaps to show a subset of data and focus on the important stuff, or to copy some data over to the word processor. Otherwise, there's just nothing to get excited about here. I can't even pretend to be excited for the purpose of writing a fun blog. Moving on! The early days of productivity took some time to figure out how best to handle object selection and manipulation. On 8-bit systems especially, modality ruled the day. Today we've settled on the paradigm, where we select an object to manipulate, then choose the manipulation. Modality-driven software was the opposite. First, choose an action, then choose the object to affect, i.e. . To move a paragraph, we first select , to indicate our intention to "move." The system switches to a text selection mode, allowing us to highlight the text we wish to move. Finally, we position the cursor at the new location for the text, hit , and the text is moved. Its backwards, relatively speaking, but easy enough to adjust to. Thanks to AppleWork s integration, we can copy/paste between any two Desktop documents. It's a little strange, because copy and paste are both considered "copy" operations, via . We copy to the clipboard from application A, then we copy from the clipboard into application B, using menu prompts along the way to specify the direction of the copy. Copying has its quirks, though. Copying between two documents of the same type behaves as expected. Across application types, copying into the word processor fares best, and most closely meets expectations. But we still encounter broken formatting, like how a line of text that spans multiple cells in the spreadsheet will break apart into discrete, tab-width sized chunks in the word processor. What we actually want is to do is "print" to the clipboard, as backward as that sounds. Depending on the module, different print options become available, to define what part of the data we want to print, and how to format it. Once done, printing to is an option. The end result is much cleaner data that is closer to WYSIWYG over the normal clipboard copy command. "Print to clipboard" is the only useful cross-application option, in my testing. As the connoisseur of modern computer software that you are, I know you know that however good something is, it could always be a little better. Most software requires us to beg and plead for the developer to make the improvements that will ease our mortal burdens. Some software embraces the notion of "extension," allowing itself to be a mere vessel for thoughts yet unthought, ideas yet unrealized. When you bought AppleWorks , it never occurred to you that you'd even want it to do outlining, until you saw ThinkTank and now you kinda wish you had something like that. AppleWorks is shockingly accommodating to our wishes. One of the core features of Lissner's engine is a crazy-efficient memory management assembly routine. This gives, what by all rights should be "not enough computer," the superpower of fast app switching. Especially with a ProDisk (hard drive) attached, AppleWorks can become essentially a graphical shell for the Apple II. A number of companies took advantage of this and created various add-on packages for AppleWorks . Beagle Bros, JEM Software, Pinpoint Publishing, and PBI Software collectively published over 100 extensions. They had a lot of competitive overlap, but provided add-ons like: This was all well and good, but there was no official plug-in architecture for AppleWorks ; it was every developer for themselves. Installation routines were effectively "patches" to the base application, and there was no guarantee that patch A wouldn't step on patch B's toes during the installation process. It put some burden on the end-user to detangle things like installation order, or even compatibility with other add-ons of interest. Beagle Bros wanted to solve that problem once and for all. TimeOut was their solution to a simple, universal plug-in architecture for AppleWorks . Developers targeting TimeOut could rely on it to do the down-and-dirty interfacing with AppleWorks's memory management routines, without having to worry about patching or memory collisions. For the end-user, adding new TimeOut modules to their system was as simple as copying a single file to the AppleWorks directory. This worked like a champ, and eventually led to Beagle Bros being the contractor for AppleWorks 3 . As the main app developer, they could steer its growth to align with their own vision, and so TimeOut became part of the foundation of AppleWorks proper. This then made it super simple to produce updates of significant value to the end-user, because those upgrades already existed in the form of TimeOut extensions. And so, AppleWorks 3 received its first built-in spell checker as a result. As time went on, the outliner, expanded Desktop, better clipboards, and the like all became built-in features to AppleWorks . The big one, from my perspective, is TimeOut UltraMacros. I have it installed as an extension here in AppleWorks 3 , and in AppleWorks 5 it became a built-in feature. With it, we get a kind of mini-programming language, which includes if/then/else statements, variables, loops, value comparisons, and more than enough to fill out a 110-page manual. Macros work across all AppleWorks apps, and since the language is identical across apps, if you know how to script one, you know how to script all of them. Still a few more years until the 6502 reaches its maximum potential. With the powerful combination of AppleWorks + UltraMacros + StoryWorks , we have a veritable turducken of creative utility. In later writeups espousing the benefits of the AppleWorks plug-in system, it was suggested that future application authors would be writing exclusively with AppleWorks as the hosting application in mind. I can see the appeal. Unfortunately, StoryWorks didn't get that memo, so the workflow between AppleWorks and StoryWorks isn't the seamless experience I would have liked. They are two completely separate programs; quit one to enter the other for each phase of the writing/debugging development cycle. Let's all take a moment to re-appreciate our multitasking operating systems. Now, I've never written a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) before. In browsing the books of my youth, I can see how AppleWorks's integration could be useful in designing such a thing. I can keep multiple documents open simultaneously, and jump quickly between them with . Here's my plan. With the spreadsheet, I'll keep a list of page branches. This will sketch out the core content on each page, with page numbers showing where each choice leads. In the database, I'll set up a template for the "programming" information for each page, based on the spreadsheet sketch. The database's 70-character limit on fields means I can't type the entire story into the database, but I can rough out a plot point or two. Then, in the word processor, I'll merge the database into a template to save me from tedious, manual boilerplate formatting. Once merged, if I've done my job right, that should build a skeletal game I can dry run through StoryWorks . "It's so simple, I can't believe people struggle to write games," the author scoffed. OK, look, I was out of pocket and I take it all back. In the previous section I was a naive child, unaware of his own ignorance. That was "Then Me" and he was a fool. "Now Me" is wiser, less prone to shooting his mouth off about things he doesn't understand. Making games is hard, I can admit that now. My biggest stumbling block is conceptually very simple: I don't know how to write a CYOA. What seemed like a clear plan in my mind turns out to not be that in practice. I thought, "Start with a rough sketch, start filling in details, repeat until done." would work. So, fine, all this really means is that I'm not a game designer, a fact I actually already knew. Looking through websites about how to create such games, everyone seems to have a different take. Spreadsheets as an organizational tool comes up a lot, as does sketching out decision trees, for which the "Paint" add-on might work, but I have a better plan. For my first attempt, I simply don't have the wherewithal to create something this intricate. My goal is to push the software, not my brain, so I'm going to be a thief and steal someone else's idea. Or rather, I'm going to steal someone else's structure. The original Choose Your Own Adventure series, the "fourth best selling children's series of all time," was established by Edward Packard in 1976. Relaunched by Chooseco in 2010 , the classics have been reprinted in handy box sets, and even new adventures have been published. If you've ever wished for a Cthulhu-themed CYOA, aimed at readers 9 - 12, your very specific prayer has been answered. The original CYOA books are also available on the Internet Archive's "Open Library" program. My intention was to get "inspired by" those, but instead I'm going to swipe the basic decision tree from one, and write my own story. There is a spy adventure called "The Deadly Shadow," by Richard Brightfield, that I will lean on for the heavy lifting of providing the structure for my story about low-rent super agent, James Epoxy. Ah, let's just go ahead and call it a parody at this point. There's no point in kidding myself that I'm about to do anything original. In working through my failed attempts, I encountered some frustrating limitations of AppleWorks integration. In AppleWorks , we have an option to set numbered "markers" throughout a word processing document. These are invisible tags that can be jumped to, by number, for quick navigation to known locations. StoryWorks relies on these to delineate story "segments." Just as AppleWorks can jump to markers, so too does StoryWorks use the same principle to jump to segments. The difference is that StoryWorks will only display text up to the next segment marker, effectively splitting the text into something akin to HyperCard "cards." And so, like HyperCard , StoryWorks also calls a collection of cards a "stack." In setting up my word processing template, I added segment markers where appropriate. Merging in the test data went smoothly, the result of which was a new document written to disk as ASCII. Maybe you already smell the trouble? ASCII conversion stripped out all non-printable tags and markers, rendering it StoryWorks- incompatible. That means adding StoryWorks markers must be done post data merge. Luckily, I have UltraMacros installed, so complex, repetitive, menu-driven marker creation is a simple self-defined keystroke away. In fact, because macros are just "a list of keyboard commands performed in order" I should be able to semi-automate find-and-replace placeholder text of my own design with a real StoryWorks marker. If I run that a few times I can prep my document for StoryWorks ingestion lickety-split. Does anyone still use that term? Where did that phrase come from, anyway? One thing I've quickly learned is that debugging is tricky. StoryWorks will parse the AppleWorks document and list its errors, but in practice I found that an early error can cascade, generating pages of errors. All we can really do is fix the first one and test again, hoping the later ones will disappear. So the proper strategy is to test early, test often. Before there is anything resembling a cohesive narrative, we need to make sure the skeleton of the project, as merged from the database, compiles and works. For this purpose, it actually does help to have even truncated page descriptions populated from the database, just to get a yes/no understanding if navigation is working. First, here's the template I've come up with. and placeholders in the template align with field names in the database. During a merge, possible field names are presented in a list for insertion, making it impossible to accidentally mistype one. means "don't insert a blank line if this database entry is blank." will always insert something , even if there is no entry in a record. Here's what a representative record looks like. You can see the field names are referenced in the template, above. As I mentioned earlier, the merge gives us an ASCII text file. That file, before adding true markers via macros, looks like this; note the text I use as a placeholder for where the macro should place a real page marker. I see that the mail merge did not follow through on the promise of skipping blank entries. I also see that, despite showing me centered text on screen in my template, that was stripped from the document as well. I have quite a bit of cleanup to do to tighten up these layouts. This is becoming work. Next, I'll run the macro I created to automate marker insertion. Macros are action-for-action transcripts of the keyboard actions required to accomplish a task, including cursor repositioning or text cleanup to prepare for the next step. Simple macros can be built simply, because macros are defined in the language of the AppleWorks user . I cannot praise this approach to macro scripting enough, and I will bring it up every opportunity I can. The more I encounter it, the more I honestly feel something fundamental has been taken from users over time. It's one thing to allow someone to record their actions blindly, with a slightly patronizing "There, there, don't worry your sweet little head about how this all works." It's quite another thing to tell a user, "Hey, you know all those tools you've been learning? You can use those exact same skills in powerful new ways." It would be relatively simple then to teach someone how to wrap an existing macro in a loop or decision construct ( UltraMacros can do these things and more), building up a foundation of self-confidence. It must surely be far more accessible than whatever Google is proposing. I mean, speaking of Cthulhu! After running my macro to the end of the document (holding down the macro shortcut auto-repeated until finished), here's the final result. I have to to "zoom" into the document and reveal the hidden formatting codes, but so far so good. Everything appears to be ready for StoryWorks . Fingers crossed. Hot dang, got it on the first try! (as far as you know) Now that the basic structure seems to be in working order, the last thing to do is write an entire novel. *dry cough * What a delightful piece of software; a delicious turducken! It will make excellent sandwiches for tomorrow's lunch. Easy to learn, easy to use, and even relatively complex cross-application actions are achievable with a gentle learning curve. I found I only needed manuals and books for very rare, "Can AppleWorks even do this?" questions, and very rarely for, "I'm stumped." Of the word processors I've covered to date it's easily my favorite. Typing is responsive and editing is intuitive. I like the advanced tools, like markers, though I think other tools could be made easier to use or expanded. Keyboard shortcuts became second-nature very rapidly. Tasks I usually dread, like mail merge, are trivially accomplished. The database " is ." It exists. It's fine. Perhaps its simplicity is a virtue, to some degree? I'm not personally smitten, but I'm glad to have it, and it did solve a real problem for me with the CYOA construction. I enjoyed the spreadsheet as much as I did VisiCalc , which is to say it's very good but Lotus 1-2-3 still wins the day. Still, it's a lot of bang for your buck, considering it's only 1/3 of this package. Being able to easily share data with the other modules elevates its usefulness over VisiCalc . Its convenience gives it a clear win. Plus, it didn't include "Copilot integration" long before Microsoft removed it from Excel . Perhaps the biggest takeaway for me is the stark reminder of how much can be achieved with so little: so little CPU, so little RAM, so little hard disk space. One can't help but ponder, "If this is what 128KB can do, imagine applying the same discipline toward 1MB of RAM." Writing for inCider , Oct. 1989, Senior Editor Paul Statt compared the development cycle of Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 (a rather notorious, oft-delayed "update") with AppleWorks 3 . Both were initially created by lone developers, Jonathan Sachs and Rupert Lissner. Release 3 of Lotus took a team of 40 developers years to write and shipped on 14 floppy discs. AppleWorks 3 was written by three Beagle Bros developers and shipped on two double-sided discs. An update to Lotus likely meant also updating one's computer to a 286 with 1MB of RAM and a hard drive. AppleWorks 3 ran on the exact same 128KB machine the version 1 ran on. Almost 40 years later, his complaint feels uncomfortably modern, don't you think? In recent news we read of ways to whittle Microsoft's 1GB weather app "down to" 130MB RAM consumption. While on the other hand, we have something like Weatherbot , occupying 6MB RAM on Windows 11 and about 2MB on System 7.5.5 (yes, it runs natively on both and more!) The call for an efficient use of system resources is clearly still championed by some, but I don't see much of a call for brutal efficiency. Using 1/100 the RAM of a Microsoft-made app is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but let's get far more ambitious. No more thinking in megabytes, think in kilobytes ; express ambition by orders of magnitude . AppleWorks singlehandedly kept Apple IIs in production use for decades , well into the GUI era, well past their "prime." We deserve such longevity again. We need it. There is a financial cudgel of planned obsolescence that beats us down for lunch money on a regular basis. We're told it's for progress, but that proposition holds no tether to reality when we can see and touch a 128KB rebuttal that proves the bully a liar. Don't worry, I wouldn't leave you hanging. The beginning of my James Epoxy CYOA; pause to read. The description of Dimitrius is straight from the source book; I did not set that up for my running gag! Ways to improve the experience, notable deficiencies, workarounds, and notes about incorporating the software into modern workflows (if possible). As with many tools of this type and era, the program's emphasis on "printing" limits our formatting options pretty drastically. We can only embed non-printing printer codes into a document, and that requires setting toggles for (say) bold to start and stop at specific points in the page. It's anachronistic in all of the non-nostalgic, annoying ways. Late in my review cycle I came across a project keeping ProDOS alive on real Apple II hardware. The last official version of Apple ProDOS was 2.0.3 in 1993, but this project is at 2.4.3 with 2.5 on the way. John Brooks has been maintaining this for years now. It includes a kind of app fast launcher called Bitsy Bye which might smooth the process of switching between apps (like between AppleWorks and StoryWorks , in my case), if for no other reason than it appears to eliminate keystrokes and simplify file navigation. 1984 rocked. AppleWin x64 1.32.00 on Windows 11 Emulating a prohibitively expensive Enhanced Apple IIe. All cards and hard drive included, maybe $8,000? ($22K in 2026) 3x machine speed and enhanced disk access Super Serial Card Mockingboard C Disk II w/two floppy drives Hard Disk Controller with 5MB ProDrive Z80 SoftCard RamWorks III (3MB) AppleWorks 3 TimeOut UltraMacros In the database, will "zoom in" and "zoom out" between the record list and an individual record. In the spreadsheet, it will toggle display of raw values or formulas embedded in the cells. In the word processor, it will reveal hidden formatting, like for printing, navigation tags, bold/italic format codes, carriage returns, and so on. Graphing and plotting spreadsheet data, for the Lotus -envious Expanding the limits of open documents, clipboard, database size A full clone of MacPaint Appointment calendar High-resolution font support The new version of AppleWin x64 makes it super simple to install a whole host of fun circuit boards into various slots. You can build the pimped out Apple IIe of your dreams effortlessly. I mostly ran at 300% CPU speed and experienced no quirks, repeating keys, crashes, or anything else unbecoming of a well-behaved computer. AppleWorks never crashed; the recent update to AppleWin x64 worked perfectly. I did have AppleWorks fail to bring in some fields when I copied from the database into the word processor. CiderPress2 works perfectly for opening Apple II disk images. Hard drive images are of file extension, and CiderPress2 can manage these, including copying file structures between disk images to cobble together your own custom disk from others. CiderPress2 can natively open AppleWorks documents to show formatted content. Personally, I found it better to print from AppleWorks to an ASCII file, then copy out the text from that via CiderPress2 . Doing so will ensure no hidden AppleWorks formatting codes are copied over. Modality The modal nature of the editing tools limits the power of macros. If we could select some text, then apply a macro to that selection, that would be fantastic. Markdown keyboard shortcuts would be a breeze! StoryWorks The biggest issue I have is how there is no option for exporting standalone stories. Being able to build a bootable Apple II floppy would turn it into a great, simple game maker; translations of existing CYOA adventures would almost be self-coding. I would also like for it to respect formatting codes, like centering. Spreadsheet Though opening DIF files is an option, I had zero luck getting it to open my VisiCalc DIF exports. It doesn't match the integration goals of the program, but I did miss the slash menu; it could have been a nice alternate UI for those transitioning to AppleWorks . Editing cells, such as to change a cell from a label to a value, always tripped me up. Considering this is version 3, well after Lotus 1-2-3 hit the scene, I do wish for better control over column widths and some concession to graph making. 3D spreadsheets, linking a cell in one sheet to an entirely different file, would be useful; this feature debuted in AppleWorks 5 . Database Basic concerns about being unable to apply value types to fields, or any kind of data input validation, are addressed in AppleWorks 4 and 5. Form layout formatting tools are overly simplistic. Being able to merge into the word processor directly from disk, rather than from the clipboard, would be helpful. Word Processor I don't have much to complain about. It is more robust than it first appears, with a gentle learning curve. I think word count should be surfaced to the main UI, and the on-screen ruler could be more informative.
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