FullWrite Professional was a word processor application for the Apple Macintosh, released in late 1988 by Ashton-Tate. The program was notable for its combination of a true WYSIWYG interface, powerful long-document processing features, and a well regarded outliner. It was also noted for its high resource demands, bugs, and its very late release. In spite of these problems, FullWrite developed a faithful following and some amount of commercial success. Douglas Adams used FullWrite as his primary word processor for some time. Douglas Hofstadter published several of his books directly from FullWrite, notably Le Ton beau de Marot. The product changed hands in the aftermath of Ashton-Tate's early 1990s business failure, and most of its problems were addressed in a major upgrade in 1995. By this point Microsoft Word dominated the Mac word processor market and the improved FullWrite never became particularly widely used. Since 1998, the product has been available as freeware. History Genesis FullWrite started life at a small company, Ann Arbor Softworks, publishers of the earlier FullPaint. Among a myriad of programs that were more or less direct clones of MacPaint, FullPaint was one of the first that really differentiated itself and was successful in the market. The company opened a sales office and changed their official address to Newbury Park, California, although most of the company, notably development, remained in Ann Arbor, MI. Looking for a new product while FullPaint was maturing, the team eventually decided on a word processor. At the time, the Mac word processor market was dominated by MacWrite, released free with the Macintosh when it first launched. MacWrite introduced a semi-WYSIWYG GUI to word processor users, and many of its conventions remain as standards today - selecting text with a drag of the mouse and then cutting it, for instance. Although MacWrite was a credible system for short documents, it lacked any of the features needed for long-document preparation, and had significant performance problems when creating documents more than a few pages long. The DOS word processor market was dominated by programs like WordStar and WordPerfect. These programs offered considerable power, including features for footnotes, table of contents and similar, but typically wrapped in a difficult to use and non-WYSIWYG editor. In spite of these problems, these applications were the only way to edit very large documents, and their difficult learning curve was addressed largely though consulting services - the term "word processor"