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Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
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| WriteNow | |
|---|---|
 WriteNow 1.00 on the Mac platform | |
| Original authors | John Anderson, Bill Tschumy |
| Developer | T/Maker |
| Release | 1985 |
| Final release | WriteNow 4.0[1]
|
| Operating system | Macintosh, NeXTSTEP |
| Type | Word processor |
| License | Proprietary |
WriteNow is a word processor application for the original Apple Macintosh and later computers in the NeXT product line. The application is one of two word processors that were first developed with the goal that they be available at the time of the Mac product launch in 1984, and was the primary word processor for computers manufactured by NeXT.[2] WriteNow was purchased from T/Maker by WordStar in 1993,[3] but shortly after that, WordStar merged with SoftKey,[4] which ultimately led to its discontinuation. It had a combination of powerful features, excellent performance, and small system requirements.
WriteNow was written for Apple Computer, Inc., by John Anderson and Bill Tschumy in Seattle, separate from the Macintosh computer and MacWrite word processor development teams. Steve Jobs was concerned that those programming MacWrite were not going to be ready for the 1984 release date of the Macintosh;[5] Apple Computer therefore commissioned a team of programmers, friends of Apple engineer Bud Tribble, to work independently on a similar project, which eventually became WriteNow.[2] Members of the WriteNow team knew about MacWrite, but members of the MacWrite team did not know about WriteNow.[citation needed]
Ultimately, MacWrite was completed on schedule and shipped with the Macintosh. This left WriteNow in limbo until Jobs left Apple to form NeXT and bought Solaster Software which was started by John Anderson, Bill Tschumy and Christopher Stinson.[citation needed] John and Bill, the authors of WriteNow, joined NeXT. WriteNow marketing rights ended up being owned by NeXT,[2] and WriteNow released for the Macintosh in 1985, published by the T/Maker Company.
In October 1988, WriteNow 2.0 was released on Macintosh,[6] adding dictionaries, character / word / paragraph count, import and export of RTF and MacWrite files, and updated compatibility with recent system enhancements.[7][8] Version 3.0 introduced style sheets.[9]
WriteNow improved on some of the limitations of MacWrite through the better handling of large documents and the addition of features such as spell check and footnotes. It was "lean and fast," being written entirely in assembly language,[2] and it was suited for Macintosh users with only 400 KB floppy disk.[10] WriteNow went through several versions culminating (in 1993) with version 4.0.2, which continued the "lean and fast" reputation while adding features such as tables.
In the opinion of many of its users, WriteNow represented the ideal Macintosh application. It had a simple, intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), no copy protection, and it worked in practically every revision of the Macintosh operating system, including in the Mac 68k emulator on PowerPC Macs and in the Classic Environment under Mac OS X. Its biggest claim to fame, however, was its speed. It was written in assembly language (Motorola 680x0) by a group of developers who had a reputation for producing extremely efficient code. The user interface was unusual in that, while the typical word processor had a ruler embedded in the main document window, WriteNow used a separate, fixed window that could be sent into the background, freeing screen space on the compact Mac's small nine-inch screen to display an additional line or two of text.
Early on WriteNow was ported to the NeXT operating system and was subsequently bundled with NeXT workstations.
Due to concerns of third-party publishers such as WordPerfect over the issue of competing with a free word processor, it was unbundled 1 October 1991[5][11] and ownership transferred to Appsoft, which sold it as shrink-wrapped software.[12] From that time, NeXTSTEP shipped without a full-featured word processing program. WriteNow for NeXT became available for sale on October 15 for $199.[13]
WriteNow was written in Motorola 68k assembly language, upon which the NeXT hardware was based.
Compute!'s Apple Applications in 1987 wrote that "WriteNow is the Pegasus of Macintosh word processors—swift, easy to learn and use, and packed with power".[14]
MacUser gave WriteNow 2.0 for Macintosh a 4 mice (out of 5) in the August 1989 issue, pitting it against MacWrite II. It praised the speed of the application, while criticizing the complexity of the multi-column formatting.[8] WriteNow won MacUser's Editor's Choice Award for Best New Word Processor in 1986[15] and 1988.[16]
Around 1993, rights to WriteNow (for both Macintosh and NeXT operating systems) were purchased by WordStar.[3] Shortly after that, WordStar merged with SoftKey,[17] and WriteNow was later discontinued. The lifecycle of computers using the 680x0 architecture was coming to an end, and the architecture-specific assembly language code that made WriteNow so much faster than its competitors also made it much more difficult to port to the new PowerPC processor[1] than competing word processors written in high-level languages such as C.
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
WriteNow is a word processor application for the original Apple Macintosh and later computers in the NeXT product line. The application is one of two word processors that were first developed with the goal that they be available at the time of the Mac product launch in 1984, and was the primary word processor for computers manufactured by NeXT. WriteNow was purchased from T/Maker by WordStar in 1993, but shortly after that, WordStar merged with SoftKey, which ultimately led to its discontinuation. It had a combination of powerful features, excellent performance, and small system requirements.
Now Software was the producer of Now Up-to-Date & Contact, a calendaring software and contact manager for individuals and groups, for macOS and Windows. The company was incorporated in 1989. Now Software, then based in Portland, Oregon, was acquired by Qualcomm in 1997. At the time of acquisition, Qualcomm reported (based on data from the company and from industry research firm Softletter) that Now Software was the "71st-largest software company in the U.S. with close to two million users" of its products. Qualcomm also noted that Now Software's products had won high praise, "including Product of the Year, multiple Editor's and Reader's Choice honors and seven World Class Awards". In 1999, the intellectual properties of the original company, including the name, were acquired by Power On Software, which relaunched the company and name. On August 27, 2009, the company released Now X, the successor to Now Up-to-Date & Contact. Now X was rated poorly by Macworld, which called it "a program that doesn't rise anywhere near the level of its predecessor". In March 2010, the company suspended its day-to-day operations. In 2011, InformationWeek included Now Up-to-Date & Contact in its list of "Great Lost Software", sixteen great defunct software applications, along with Adobe FreeHand, Adobe GoLive, Ecco Pro, HyperCard, Lotus Improv, Outlook Express, Palm Desktop, Ventura Publisher, WriteNow, and others. Two of the original programmers of Now Up-to-Date, Dave Riggle and John Chaffee, moved on to found the software company BusyMac, which produces the software applications BusyCal and BusyContacts, filling a similar niche market to the one filled by Now Up-to-Date & Contact.
WN may refer to: WN postcode area, England Southwest Airlines (IATA code WN) WeatherNation TV White nationalism White noise (disambiguation) Wikinews, a defunct news wiki World News Network (WN.com), a news aggregator service Willesden Traction Maintenance Depot, a railway depot in London, England Wisconsin Northern Railroad (reporting mark WN) WordNet, a semantic lexicon for the English language World News (disambiguation) Web novel WN catalogue, a catalogue of works by Frédéric Chopin Tungsten nitride, an inorganic compound with formula WN .wn, the default extension for documents in the WriteNow word processor's native file format Willie Nelson (born 1933), American country musician Welsh Not
Kali Varghese formerly known as Charlie George is a British writer, performer, poet and comedian from Swindon. In 2019, she won "The Comedy Bloomers LGBTQ+ New Comedian of the Year" and was a runner-up in both So You Think You're Funny and Funny Women. As a scriptwriter, she has written for British comedy shows Have I Got News for You, Death to 2020, Death to 2021, Blankety Blank, Joe Lycett's Got Your Back and Frankie Boyle's New World Order. Varghese was chosen to feature in Charlie Brooker’s writers' room for Cunk & Other Humans (2019), the BAFTA-nominated AntiViral Wipe (2020), Death to 2020 and ...2021 for Netflix and BBC’s Emmy-nominated Cunk on Life. She has written for the C4 Election night special, 8 Out of 10 Cats, Hypothetical, Newsjack, The Now Show, Have I Got News For You, Horrible Histories, Joe Lycett’s Got Your Back, Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, Stand Up to Cancer (C4) Kiri Pritchard-McLean’s Best Medicine (R4) Season 1 and 2 and Mawaan Rizwan’s BAFTA-winning Juice (BBC). She has been published in: Tangled Roots: Real Life Stories from Mixed Race Britain, Stories of Autistic Joy and HNDL Magazine. She currently writes on all things travel, nature, gardening and decolonial perspectives on healing for our times at her Medium and Substack. In 2020, she was one of a select group of 14 new writers selected by Penguin Random House UK for their WriteNow editorial programme. In 2022, she worked with fellow comedian Victoria Comedy (winner of LGBTQ+ Comedian of the Year 2022) on the compilation show Clandestina: Queer Comedy Triple Bill, which was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In 2025, she was nominated for an Emmy Award for her work as a writer of Cunk on Life (Netflix). She has written multiple original comedy/comedy-drama scripts and won two New York Festivals Radio Awards for ‘Best Writing’ & ‘Best Regularly Scheduled Comedy Programme’ for her writing contributions to Rockanory an original series for Absolute Radio with Unusual Productions. Varghese was a regular MC/host and spoke and gigged all across the country. She was the host of a large scale touring work in collaboration with artist Amartey Golding in a show called Whose Anthem is it Anyway? with a full live band, exploring an alternative collective national anthem for England with the public using a voting app. She also co-hosted an Audible original podcast series exploring evidence-based solutions to improving wellbeing and mental health with anthropologist Mary-Ann Ochota, called Happiness and how to get it because her preferred title, Despair and how to release its death grip, was not “a viable option”, and hosted a podcast for the Tate Modern gallery called The Art of Comedy. Varghese has been in the arts in the UK since her early teens, training at Circomedia in Bristol and setting up her own dance company Dark Island Dance where she choreographed and led commercial performances for festivals and large scale events, as well as community dance in care homes and specialist schools for those with disabilities. In response to a sexist remark made in UK parliament and the creation of the feminist festival Calm Down Dear, Varghese formed the rebel feminist performance collective ‘The Femme Fatales’ exploring themes of sovereignty and bodily autonomy. Varghese occasionally gigs for and speaks at organisations such as Faith to Faithless and Humanists UK who support people with the trauma of being raised within and leaving high control religious groups. She is currently working on her first book.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Mae Jemison, aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992.
