I don’t think cross-platform UI code really took off on the Mac until maybe 20 years later. Plenty of Mac apps were built that way before that point, but they tended to be ones in the “you’re stuck using this, so it doesn’t have to be very nice” category, like Word ended up being. It doesn’t really seem to have tipped until Electron came along, and somehow web apps that use half a gigabyte of RAM to show some text became totally accepted as good enough.
Incidentally, the Cocoa UI framework that macOS uses was originally a cross platform framework that could deploy to Windows and various other OSes, back when it was made by NeXT. Apple. Apple killed that off and it became Mac-exclusive. I wonder what the world would look like if they kept support for other OSes. Maybe we’d have a good selection of cross platform apps that actually look nice and perform well.
It's horrendously tough to target for a cross-platform application when you have to bring the entire GUI toolkit along and adapt it individually to every target, even the 95% of the market gorilla that is whatever versions of Desktop Windows are the most recent 3.
- Pages.app by Pages --- amazing DTP tool which was bought by Anderson Financial Services, but then killed off when Rhapsody went away
- Macromedia Freehand --- unfortunately, they continued with their in-house toolkit to make the Mac/Windows versions, since it would have been too much work to revive the old Altsys Virtuoso code
- Quantrix Financial Modeller --- at least this still survived, but be sure to take a seat before looking up the cost per seat
- FrameMaker --- the NeXT version was the nicest one I ever used, and with Display PostScript, was far nicer to work with
- WordPerfect --- the NeXT version was far nicer than the Windows, would have been nice to see that come back
- Stone Create (and the other Stone apps) --- nice assortment of various tools which would have been quite nice to have
Lots of other way cool NeXT apps which should have done better in the market.
I never used Word in the DOS days so I can't compare, but it was obvious that Word for Windows was written natively for Windows and it "felt" much more natural in the Windows of that time.
Never really loved Word for Windows to be honest, though I used it a lot over the years. Though liked the DOS version.
Then Charles went to Microsoft where he started and led Microsoft's applications group, where he built the first versions of Microsoft Office
I mean, look, WordStar was a huge step up from a typewriter. It (and programs like it) made it possible for people like me to write.
WordStar let you get the words right. WordPerfect let you do "you asked for it, you got it" layout, which was a step up. But MacWrite and programs like it let you do WYSIWYG layout, which was huge. It was like going from typewriter to WordStar, but for layout and appearance. (The words are still more important, but the presentation also matters.)
By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so you could erase mistakes. You could set them to center or right justify text. You could create tables of justified text.
Early word processing software was amazing because it gave you more memory to work with, and didn't force you to keep so much of what you previously wrote in your head. But it was only a large step forward compared to typewriters of the time.
WYSIWYG blew all of that out of the water.
I went from a mechanical typewriter which had the whiteout tape as it's only "advanced" feature, directly to a WYSIWYG editor. It was absolutely night and day. I only saw an "advanced" electronic typewriter later in life at my grandparents house, which was used rarely and only for her accounting business as it was so expensive when they first bought it.
As far as I know my experience was pretty much normal for my peer group - as my school had a similar setup. As a kid in school, it was amazing going from having to totally re-type a rough draft to being able to make some casual edits and hit print. Hours saved for each paper, especially with the typing skills I had back then!
Word processing software was to writing as smartphones were to photography, or as the book press was to writing. Perhaps not transformational on a per feature basis, but transformational on grounds of the possibilities and market it unlocked.
Sure, there were electronic typewriters where you could type an entire line or two into memory before printing it. And, as you say, typewriters with whiteout reels that allowed you to backspace.
But if you've started a new paragraph, and you realise you want to go back and edit the previous one, and everything else needs to move down a line to accommodate? Good chance you're throwing the page away and starting from scratch.
Or you're cutting and pasting in the literal sense, using scissors and glue.
Typewriters were difficult enough that "typist" was a professional job - and many workers wouldn't do their own typing, instead recording messages onto tiny tape cassettes for a typist to type up later on. There were even foot-pedal-controlled cassette players, so typists could type with their hands and control the dictaphone tape with their feet!
WYSIWYG software was an entirely new paradigm, and changed everything.
I wrote a bunch of papers using a typewriter. Standard operating procedure was to plan out the complete paper, basically as a tree of bullet points (I used index cards), and then turn those into sentences at the typewriter. All the writing/reorganization had to happen before you sat down to type.
Keyboard templates were pretty ubiquitous.
It wasn't a Selectric, though, so mostly you just used it as a typewriter. Selectrics were expensive and mostly used in business rather than by individuals.
Even the IBM Selectrics were nothing like as good as having a word processor, which is why the transition was so fast. A friend of mine was in commercial real-estate in that period (mid-1980s) and discovered that with a computer, he could type his own offer letters and not have to bother with a secretary. My brother's law firm went through something similar. In a handful of years, there was huge adoption.
Grad school (starting 1979), there was a mainframe with DecWriter terminals and that was a big improvement but still nothing like terminal GUIs.
You might be blessed with a brain for written communication.
If I did not allow myself revision and improvement to my written text, everything I write would read like a spoken monologue, and be multiple times longer than necessary to convey my message.
I have another article about AI coming out about how we could use generative AI to make art that we've never seen before, but it's mostly used for AI slop. I'm in the middle of ranting it out into the typewriter. It's bad currently, but I make it bad first so I can remake it better later. Here's an excerpt of the intro that I'm going to be rewriting. This is the "raw clay" that I mold in editing.
> I like creating things. There's a lot of joy in being able to sit there, think about a thing, and then make that thing come into existence. This is something I really enjoy doing and I'm blessed to be able to do that as my job in DevRel.
> One of the core conflicts that i end up having with the stuff I create is that I am a bit more artistically minded than people would expect out of the gate. I mean, I get it. Tech isn't really known for *art*, it's a lot more known for being the barrier between you and artists you want to follow.
> Howeever I've ended up seeing kind of a disturbing pattern with AI tools that are meant or at least intended to aid people in the creation of art: they're almost always used to create infinite slop machines without a lick of art in the process. Today I'm going to talk about this fundamental conflict between two categories: art and content. Art is that which conveys, inspires and tells stories. Content is what goes between the ads so that media moguls can see their profit lines go up. I want to argue that a lot of what AI tools are actually being used for is content that is gussied up as if it is art.
If you want to see what the entire writing process looks like after it festers for a while in my head, I wrote out the holy grail article on Twitch: https://youtu.be/N_KNpVujAL8
I have only recently learned that I have ADHD, and have been trying to iron out all the implications of that (well, that and autism, which I also only recently learned about) -- I cannot help but wonder if a workflow like this would help me in my writing....
The big breakthrough was editing. WYSIWIG didn't solve a problem in that space. College papers didn't need different fonts, and it was sufficient to let the computer take care of formatting, like using Markdown.
I'm not dismissing the Apple, but it was priced out of my reach in 1984.
The point was that later typewriters had a features like memory, automatic indentation and erasing that were not available in 1950s era typewriters..
Hence why I had to wait until university to actually see them outside computer magazines, and only one room had them on the computer labs, versus the whole campus filled with PCs and UNIX terminals.
I bought my typewriter around 1990, a plain classical one, where I threw lots of paper away, learn to use corrector tape and ink to save them.
The early computerized typewriters kinda sucked - you could do line level edits but the print quality was dot matrix or worse.
Were such fancy machines actually common? I never saw one. For me, it was all "CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK oops! damn", until it was a whole new world with MacWrite and the ImageWriter.
Boy, oh boy were the early gen word processors a godsend!