Comment by mwattsun

One of the Mac Works coders here: A slight correction. Works for the Mac was published in 1986, not 1988.

AppleWorks for the Apple II was written by Rupert Lissner of Scotts Valley, CA for Apple Computer. AppleWorks was released early in 1984 and was written in 6502 assembler. At that time, Steve Jobs was really anxious to have software on the new Macintosh computer that would make it appealing to business users. Lissner and Jobs discussed porting AppleWorks to the Macintosh.

Lissner teamed up with former IBM salesman and Apple exec Don Williams of Santa Cruz, CA to begin work on the Mac version. Don Williams was the creator of Desktop Plan and Graph'N'Calc for the IBM PC. Their company was named Productivity Software. Within months, AppleWorks became very successful so Lissner decided he didn't need to work on the Mac version. He dropped out without writing any code.

At that time I (Michael Watson) was hired as their first employee. Williams then hired Brian Haas to write the word processor and Tim Lundeen to write the spreadsheet. I wrote the database. Lundeen and I wrote the core code to integrate the modules. Later, Ben Halpern was hired to write the drawing and charting code. We wrote it in 68000 assembler and called it "MouseWorks."

In 1986, Bill Gates visited us in Santa Cruz and a deal was struck where Microsoft would publish our program as Microsoft Works for the Macintosh. Microsoft was working on Excel for the Mac, but it wasn't ready and they wanted something on the Mac.

Lundeen dropped out before it was published in a dispute with Williams. Haas, Halpern and myself finished it up. It was published in the fall of 1986. We did two more versions, then Microsoft bought us all out and took over in 1993.

AppleWorks for the Macintosh by Apple was called ClarisWorks and became a competitor, although not a significant one.