Quark Word Juggler
A deceptively simple solution to your word processing dilemma.
The Company
Quark was founded by Tim Gill and Mark Pope in 1981. Their first two products were Word Juggler and Catalyst. (Word Juggler will be covered below.) Catalyst was an application that allowed the Apple II to run floppy disk-based applications from the hard drive.
The company took off when it released QuarkXPress in March of 1987. It quickly became the standard in desktop publishing software. That changed in the early 2000s, when it started to lose market share to Adobe InDesign. Today, Quark focuses on enterprise publishing software.
The Software
Quark released Word Juggler in the early 1980s. It was first available for the Apple III and then ported to the Apple IIe and IIc. According to the Whole Earth Catalog, Word Juggler “beat out APPLE WRITER IIe as the leading word processor on the IIe and IIc”.
A review of Word Juggler in the October 1981 issue of InfoWorld said, “The Word Juggler word processing system is the first true word processor for the Apple III computer.” The June 1983 issue of Creative Computing reported “Word Juggler is complete, fast, easy to learn, and comfortable to work with. I hope this kind of quality is the future of micro software. It is a pleasure to use.”
The Whole Earth Catalog also noted that:
“Unlike many older programs on the Apples, WORD JUGGLER is quick—it was the very first product to take advantage of Apple’s new operating system, ProDOS. Getting to and from disk, printer, current working document, and preview mode is always intuitively easy and fast. There is even a single command that converts your Apple to an expensive typewriter, where you type directly on the printer. And a single command prints a document direct from memory. With the program come 19 command-marked keys to unobtrusively replace ones on your Apple keyboard—a great help. I give WORD JUGGLER high points for transparency— you see the work, not it.”
“The included speller LEXICHECK deserves separate comment. Version 2.0 is a major improvement over previous incarnations. You can now look up words while you’re writing to see if they're right. The dictionary will highlight the questionable word, suggest correct alternatives, and install any one you like for you. When checking a whole document (which can be done without having to store on disk first) LEXICHECK also tells you the number of words in the document. Among the 50,000 words, I was bemused to find "f*ck,” which is still missing from many printed dictionaries. The words seem to be assembled as word parts, so you can get some anomalies. When S asked the speller to look up "wifing,” it said it was a valid word and offered as valid alternatives "wiling," "wiping," "wiring," and "wising.” Oh well.”
“That LEXICHECK is included helps make WORD JUGGLER an exceptional bargain.”
I wasn’t able to find a video demo of Word Juggler, but you can try it for yourself on Internet Archive. I would also recommend these two episodes from the Computer Chronicles on desktop publishing. (Co-host Gary Kildall created one of the first operating systems for the PC, CP/M. CP/M was in the running to be the main OS for the IBM PC, but lost out to MS-DOS. That story may be a future article.)
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“There is even a single command that converts your Apple to an expensive typewriter, where you type directly on the printer.”
What a wild feature! I’m imagining a user who’s scared of their computer but threw out their typewriter.