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. NeXT port 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 1st October 1991 and ownership transferred to Appsoft, which sold it as shrink-wrapped software. From that time, NeXTSTEP shipped without a full-featured word processing program. WriteNow for NeXT became available for sale on October 15 for $199. WriteNow was written in Motorola 68k assembly language, upon which the NeXT hardware was based. Reception 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". 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. WriteNow won MacUser's Editor's Choice Award for Best New Word Processor in 1986 and 1988. Discontinuation Around 1993, rights to WriteNow (for both Macintosh and NeXT operating systems) were purchased by WordStar. Shortly after that, WordStar merged with SoftKey, 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 than competing word processors written in high-level languages such as C. See also List of word processors References External links Apple Inc. software Classic Mac OS word processors 1985 software Assembly language software Discontinued software