The Mac wasn’t the only innovative product shipped by Apple in 1984. At the time, the company was still making its money from selling updated versions of the Apple II, and by then was offering models with 128 KB RAM. For those it provided a demo product developed by Rupert Lissner called AppleWorks. This was one of the first integrated ‘office’ suites, consisting of a word processor, spreadsheet and database, all within the same app.

The original 128K Mac shipped with its own two ‘killer’ apps, MacWrite, developed first by Encore Systems led by Randy Wigginton, and MacPaint, written in-house by the late Bill Atkinson (1951-2025), with its interface designed by Susan Kare. The first integrated ‘office’ suite for Mac was probably Lotus Jazz, released in 1985, and that was followed by Microsoft Works in 1986. Jazz was intended to replicate the success of Lotus 1-2-3 on PCs and proved popular with some, but it was generally considered to be overpriced at $595 and underpowered, and flopped.

Microsoft Works came from an integrated suite being developed for the Mac by Don Williams and Rupert Lissner (original developer of AppleWorks), both former Apple employees. Although first released for the Mac (apparently), it soon followed for DOS PCs, and in 1991 was released for Windows 3.0.

Meanwhile, Apple spun its app development out to its wholly-owned subsidiary Claris in 1987, but no progress was made in developing AppleWorks for the Mac. The following year, Claris bought FileMaker, a database, from Nashoba Systems, which it rebranded to FileMaker II to conform with its other Mac apps, and in 1990 it was succeeded by FileMaker Pro 1.0. However, that year Apple decided to keep Claris as a subsidiary rather than taking it public, and most of its executives resigned. AppleWorks for Apple II was upgraded by Beagle Bros, then licensed to Quality Computers.

Bob Hearn and Scott Holdaway wrote a completely new version of AppleWorks, this time for the Mac, and that was published by Claris as ClarisWorks 1.0 in October 1991. Initial modules included a word processor, drawing, painting, spreadsheet, database, and a communications terminal.

Apple’s financial woes in the 1990s brought further change. The ClarisWorks team left to develop a similar suite for BeOS, FileMaker and Claris HomePage were retained by its subsidiary, now renamed FileMaker, and its other products including ClarisWorks were brought back into Apple. Since then, HomePage was discontinued, and FileMaker changed its name to Claris International to continue developing and selling its FileMaker database products.

AppleWorks 5.0 was released in 1997 and saw Classic Mac OS through from System 7.0.1 to Mac OS 9.

That was followed by AppleWorks 6.0 in January 2000, which dropped the communications terminal in favour of a presentation module. This supported both Classic Mac OS and the new Mac OS X, although it was unable to use many of the latter’s new features. The last update to 6.2.9 was released in January 2004, and in August 2007 Apple declared AppleWorks dead, replaced by the iWork suite of Pages and Keynote in January 2004, followed by Numbers in 2007, three separate apps rather than an integrated suite. Since 2013, that suite has been provided free with each Mac user’s Apple ID.

AppleWorks was rich with document templates from brochures to postcards. It’s seen here running in Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah in 2001.

Its word processor could export to HTML, and Microsoft Word formats thanks to its support for Claris XTND technology. This is in Mac OS X 10.1 Puma in 2002.

This shows its word processor with its Accents palette at the right and integrated drawing tools at the left. This is in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar in 2003.

These are AppleWorks’ word processor document preferences, in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2006.

This is one of the popular certificate templates used in the drawing module, with its tools at the left. This is in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in 2009.

Today it seems extraordinary that AppleWorks, which shipped for Apple II in 1984, had to wait seven years until 1991 before it could run on the Mac.