26 July, 2008
By Holden Scott

I was on the hunt for the best Word Processing program from the Classic Mac OS (in application to OS 7.x – OS 9.x). While I do have MS Office 98 and 2001, I wanted to see what else was out there. Surprisngly, I don’t mind Word 98: it is lean and much faster under OS 9.x, for instance, then Word 2004 ever was in X. And the latest iteration of MS Office (2008) is more horrible than ever. Constant crashes, slow, overly bloated…

You can see MS Word’s evolution from something useable to something too sluggish and complex to be called a Word Processor. Well, at least the consumer has choice. Open Office is one alternative for OS X, but as I also use OS 9.x regularly, I set out to find the ZEN of Word Processors. The candidates are WordPerfect 3.5e, the venerable Appleworks and WriteNow.

Too me, speed is just as important as useability. If something looks great and is easy to use, but frequently crashes and is slow to respond to even the simplest of actions, I hate it. If something is fast, but is byzantine in form, I also hate it. It is the marriage of the two (speed and ease of use) that is the goal for any software developer.

Well, speed never really seemed to be much of an issue with applications in OS 9.x running on a G3 processor. OS 9.x is still a faster platform for mundane tasks compared to OS X, and using both Apple’s applications and third parties, the difference is noticable.

So I expected to find that all the Word Processors would feel equally fast, and here is what I found:

Speed findings:

WordPerfect 3.5e: Good.
Appleworks: Better.
WriteNow: Best.

WriteNow is so simple and fast, it is my first choice.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 at 8:24 pm.
Categories: Featured, Uncategorized.

8 Comments, Comment or Ping

  1. Jon

    You forgot about Nisus Writer Classic!

    It’s even still available for purchase the last time I checked. Version 4.something was even released into the wild for free, although I personally prefer ver 6. Look it up. Yes, it’s different, but quite the amazing product. One nice feature it has is the ability to create booklets by the imposition of pages into their proper spots. Just print out, fold, and staple. It is equally Word 98s equal, IMO.

    -Jon

    Feb 22nd, 2009

  2. admin

    Cool, I will check it out. Thanks.

    Feb 23rd, 2009

  3. Dan Knight

    What, you didn’t include Microsoft Windows 5.1a? Probably the best word processor ever for the Classic Mac OS – and fast on anything beyond 8 MHz.

    Feb 23rd, 2009

  4. Manuel Marques

    Dan, I think you meant Microsoft Word :) .

    But I agree, Word 5.1a is the best you can get. All my 68k machines run it perfectly, it has a really low footprint!

    Feb 24th, 2009

  5. admin

    Word 5.1a hey… I vaguely remember using it. I guess I will have to revisit it. Thanks Dan, I will check it out.

    Feb 24th, 2009

  6. Alan Dow

    Microsoft Word 5.1 (or 98 or whatever) was the word processor of choice for people who needed to produce shorter documents in a corporate environment. If properly set up with style sheets it could even simulate some semblance of efficiency, despite having a needlessly cumbersome user interface – (for example, to change a font size in a style sheet you had to burrow down through about five layers of dialog boxes). However, if faced with larger documents, Word would be noticeably slower and prone to crashing with loss of data. By comparison, many people found Nisus to be more powerful and less bloated. Nisus was rock solid even on huge files. Even if the operating system crashed taking everything with it, Nisus would often manage to leave rescued data with most of your work intact. Although easy and intuitive for a novice, Nisus also provided heavy-duty tools which could create magic in the hands of an experienced user. In one case, I was able to help a person who had just lost three weeks painstaking work in Excel and Word to a hard disk crash. It took me an hour at lunchtime to set up an automated process using Nisus macros. We left the machine running and returned later in the afternoon to find all 98 files had been processed without hitch. I began to dread having to use Word. Tasks which could be completed in Nisus within minutes using a few key strokes would often take hours in Word. Yet Nisus occupied only 516K on disk, and would run comfortably in 512K of RAM.

    Dec 4th, 2009

  7. admin

    Cool, I’ll check out Nisus Writer.

    Dec 13th, 2009

  8. Dan

    Cool article, thanks. I found an old floppy with some school assigments saved in Microsoft Word from 1995. The floppy is formatted for Macintosh, and I have a power mac 8600, but no software to open my old word docs, do you know if wordperfect 3.5e on mac 7.61 will open microsoft word documents? Or of any other potential solution, aside from buying and old copy of word for mac?

    Thanks!

    Feb 24th, 2010

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