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AppleWorks/ClarisWorks Dies Quietly

Posted by kdawson on from the out-to-pasture-or-off-to-the-knackers dept.

Several readers noted that Apple has quietly discontinued AppleWorks, in the week that the company's spreadsheet solution, Numbers, debuted in its iWork suite. The AppleWorks website now directs users to the iWork section of the Apple site. AppleWorks was introduced — before the Macintosh — in 1984 and began its long twilight as abandonware in 1999.

5 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Finally. by nine-times · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, yeah. Appleworks hadn't really seen a significant update in, what, more than 5 years? I was always surprised to learn that it was still being sold.

    I'd see it on the shelf at BestBuy and think, "Really?! Appleworks? Do people still buy that, and if they do, are they really pissed off when they figure out how out-of-date it is?"

  2. Pity by hcdejong · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It was brilliant. The only "works" package that didn't suck.
    Its integrated approach, with text processing, spreadsheet, drawing and database modules in a single application program was rather elegant. For quickly throwing together a document that needs all of those, I still haven't seen anything that beats it.

    1. Re:Pity by brownsteve · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Here is a fascinating history of ClarisWorks from one of its original authors. It was quite an accomplishment to pack all that functionality into a megabyte of RAM. Ahh... nostalgia...

  3. Re:memories by sporadic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    AppleWorks (and to a less degree, AppleWorks GS) got me through high school and college (80-mid 90's) as an English Lit/Polysci major. With the Beagle Bros' TimeOut series of add-ons, there was nothing AW couldn't handle! Ah, the good old days! Running it on an Apple IIgs with 8MG, SCSI HD, and ZipGSX accelerator, the 8-bit text based AW flew like a bat out of hell! And being the geek that I was (and still am,) I used to track all my games with the Database :) I still have the IIe and IIgs in my closet, plus a crapload of 5.25 and 3.5 floppies. Maybe I'll take them out this weekend and see if they still work. Pretty sure the machines still work.

    Sporadic

  4. Seconded, and for the oddest application by Crash+Culligan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've done more than a little with AppleWorks in my time too; in fact, I used it some Tuesday night at gaming.

    AppleWorks has (I've still got an install disk and updater, so neener) a nifty paradigm for documents. A document can hold text or graphics. The spreadsheet can be spread out on a drawing document in small pieces by opening views onto different parts of a spreadsheet. Thus, a document can be spread out across ten or eleven little boxes on a single page.

    I thought that would make AppleWorks hard to give up, and combined with the other parts of it, I may still keep it around for a good long time (Intel processor on my next computer notwithstanding).

    When I got Numbers, of course I could create as many two-and-three-column spreadsheets on the page as I wanted and link them together. A second sheet contained the "hidden" information which the other tables use for lookups. And the creative lookup scheme I was able to assemble made life a little easier.

    So I've got a new character sheet. I'll still look back, but I don't regret the move.

    --
    You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.