FullWrite Professional

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FullWrite Professional, box cover from the 1.5s release.

FullWrite Professional was a word processor application for the Apple Macintosh, released in late 1988 by Ashton-Tate. Though it was released a year later than promised and had a number of problems, it developed a faithful following and some amount of commercial success. It was particularly well-liked for its excellent outliner, and its ability to create and organize complete book-length documents. Douglas Adams used FullWrite as his primary word processor for some time. As of 1998, the product has been available as freeware.

1 Genesis
2 Development
3 Shipping
4 Continued development
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Genesis

The product started life at a 3rd party, Ann Arbor Softworks, publishers of the earlier FullPaint. FullPaint was one of the first programs to really differentiate itself from MacPaint, and was fairly successful. The company opened a sales office and changed their official address to Newbury Park, CA, although most of the company, notably development, remained in Ann Arbor, MI. Looking for a new product when FullPaint was maturing, the team eventually decided on a word processor. They then started an in-depth study of what features a new product should have, hoping to make the one perfect program.

One of the primary "selling features" of their new word processor was a well-integrated outliner. At the time, outliners were extremely popular, and many felt they were ushering in an entirely new way of creating documents. FullWrite's implementation was particularly well received. An entire document could be a single outline, even across multiple chapters, or a document could contain many independent outlines. Each outline item had a header and a body, and either or both could be included in the visible document. This meant that, unlike most systems, the outline item headers did not have to be part of the document so they could be used purely for organizational purposes. Alternatively, the outline item bodies could be used for notes that were not normally part of the printed document. Users could also attach notes to the outline headers, to remind themselves what to put into that section when they came back to it later. FullWrite continues to appear in discussions about outliners today.

FullWrite was the first completely WYSIWYG word processor that showed complete pages as they would appear on the printer. This feature is now standard in most word processors, although often accessed in a very modal way. FullWrite also included a number of advanced layout features, such as user-adjustable kerning, automatic hyphenation, flow around irregular shapes (pictures), and sticky notes that allowed authors to place comments within the document. Text could be marked for inclusion in footnotes/endnotes, the table of contents or an index, all of which were automatically maintained. FullWrite also featured change bars, allowing users to track changes to the documents. Most of these features have since appeared on other high-end products, but at the time FullWrite was considerably more advanced than any competing products on the market.

[edit] Development

These features came at a price: time-to-market. Development started in April 1986 and pre-release advertising was launched in December to announce it. It was first shown to the public at MacWorld Expo in January 1987 to be released later that year. The date continued to be pushed further back. In March Computer Reseller News reported it was being readied for April, but by August MacWEEK reported it to be "a month away" while a November issue claimed that the documentation was complete but the program was not.

By this point, the product had become something of a joke in the Mac world, winning numerous (unofficial) vapourware awards. Microsoft released Word 3.0 in 1987, and Ann Arbor responded by taking out a two-page advertisement headlined DON'T BUY IT, stating that FullWrite was "a superior word processor, at a better price ... at your store within 60 days". This too turned out to be rather optimistic.

Just prior to the January 1988 MacWorld Expo, where the company planned to ship the product, Ann Arbour was purchased by Ashton-Tate, with whom discussions had been underway for some time. The acquisition was kept a secret and, instead of shipping, the company gave away 10,000 copies of the current beta version to drum up some buzz. This version contained an easter egg which would convert selected text into pig Latin if the user held down the right keys. It also held copies of an early Mac computer virus, nVIR (disputed?).

[edit] Shipping

After minor edits to change the copyright notices and packaging, the program finally shipped as version 1.1 late in April 1988, at a suggested retail price of $395.

The demo version of FullWrite completely filled a floppy disk, and FullWrite would crash if it did not have disk space available. Therefore when potential customers launched the program directly off of the floppy (which was full), the program would crash. Ashton-Tate made tens of thousands of these demo disks, and was converting less than .1% of them to actual sales.

Reviews of FullWrite were generally positive, although they noted a number of bugs and generally slow performance. One reviewer found that a fast typist could outtype the editor on even a reasonably fast machine like the SE/30. A more serious problem was that the program needed 1 MB of RAM to work, and 2 MB and a hard drive to really work. To make matters worse, Ashton-Tate downplayed the amount of memory required rather than admitting how much was really needed. This was at a time when most Macs shipped with only 1 MB and used floppies for storage. This may have been the Achilles' heel of the product, seriously limiting its marketplace.

The only notable outright missing feature was that the program did not include a built-in table editor – particularly odd when considering that FullWrite did include a simple MacDraw-like illustration module built-in. Many reviews also found the interface confusing and difficult to learn, a problem that was not helped by the fact that the "Learning" manual was just a rearranged copy of the reference manual.

Nevertheless the product managed to gather a loyal, if small, following. For those users with machines capable of running it, it delivered on its promise of power with a Mac interface. It was perhaps the first program on the Mac that could be used to write large documents and books, something the excellent outliner helped with enormously.

The program managed to provide most word-processing features, but it was in need of additional cleanup and attention to performance and memory footprint. Ashton-Tate, however, never addressed these issues. Three minor versions were released in 1989 and 1990: 1.1, 1.5, and 1.5s. These fixed many bugs and some minor features, and 1.5s added a rarely-used ability to add sound notes to documents (thus the "s" version). They also bundled an external product known as Tycho TableMaker to address that hole, but it was not well integrated, as one might expect from an external program. Microsoft Word released a major upgrade in 1988, 4.0, and Ashton-Tate never responded. Although its death lingered, by 1990 the product was at a standstill.

By this point Ashton-Tate's cash cow, dBASE, was performing poorly in the market. dBASE IV for IBM PC compatibles was released the same year as FullWrite and was completely unsuccessful. Customers started abandoning it for the various dBASE clones like FoxPro and Clipper, many of which had actually been better than dBASE for some time. By 1990 Ashton-Tate was in serious financial trouble, and was eventually purchased by Borland in 1991. Work was underway on a cross-platform version of FullWrite, but Borland's purchase effectively ended all Mac development.

[edit] Continued development

In late 1993 Borland sold off the product to Akimbo Systems, a small company started by Roy Leban, one of FullWrite's original developers. They immediately patched it to work on System 7, the latest Macintosh operating system, and they released it as 1.7.

A greatly updated FullWrite 2.0 (dropping "Professional") followed early the next year, adding a number of new features including AppleScripting, importers/exporters based on Claris's XTND, a built-in table editor, an extensive and powerful plug-in architecture (including a pig latin plug-in), and support for the "EGO Protocol" which used AppleEvents to allow in-place editing of graphics. The most important "upgrade" was a major effort concentrating on performance and memory footprint, which was reduced by about 500 kb, allowing it to run somewhat smoothly in only 700 kb. Reviews were again generally positive, although now the main concerns were the odd menu layout that made some commands difficult to find, and the lack of a cascading style system.

The new version was fairly well received, but by this point in time, Microsoft Word's stranglehold on the Mac market was complete. Akimbo re-used the layout engine to produce a new HTML-editing tool known as Globetrotter Web Publisher, designed to allow people who did not know HTML to publish complete web sites, but it gained only a scant following. After several years of small sales, Akimbo decided to release FullWrite 2.0.6 as freeware in 1998 when the company shut down. Globetrotter was not similarly released because of its use of the GIF patent, for which Unisys insisted royalties be paid, even on free copies.