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                       Subject:                                Time: 4:06 PM
  OFFICE MEMO          High School Writing Lab Summary         Date:
2/15/90
I promised to summarize the responses to my question, which Mac word processor
would be well suited for a writing skills laboratory and give acceptable
performance if multi-launched simultaneously by 20 users
from a single AppleShare server.

The majority of the respondents recommended WriteNow, which had 
been my own inclination based on a review of the literature.

Primary reasons given:
* It is mean and lean--very tightly written, so its fast and small.
* Very easy to learn but powerful.
* Has everything needed for student papers, including good, easy to use
  footnoting; no unnecessary bells and whistles that might distract 
  students' attention.
* Requires least effort to learn the machanics, students can concentrate
  on content.
* Very fast spelling checker with nice user interface.
* Version 2.2 comes with a 1.4 million word Thesaurus. Not clear yet
  what that means for performance, but a good resource for a writing lab.
* Easy to combine with Acta if outlining is desired.
* Big bang for the buck:  EduTech sells it for $48.75 (1-49 copies)
  $42 (>50) to educational institutions.

If 20 students launch the application simultaneously, WriteNow may save two or
three minutes over its nearest competitor in getting everyone ready to start
writing because it requires the least amount of code to be read in from the
server. Application sizes:

WriteNow 2.0            102k
WriteNow 2.2            124k
MacWrite 5.0             171k
MS Write 1.0              278k
WordPerfect 1.02      317k
MindWrite 2.1            397k
MacWrite II 1.0          577k
MS Word 4.0               650k

Like launching, spell checking is another operation that creates dead time and
may be slowed down considerably by server bottlenecks.
In WriteNow, 
* The spelling checker is very quick and efficient and does come with a
  stripped down (50K word) dictionary which would speed things up.
* Students could keep their own dictionary extensions on their document
  floppy disks.
* You read the dictionary in once, and as long as you
  keep the spelling checker window open it is kept in memory.
* The "smart" spelling checker, once run, only rechecks recently changed
  sections instead of going through the entire document again.

Comments about other word processors:
WordPerfect :       bigger, far too complicated, "the less said the better!"
MindWrite :           bigger, slower, has excellent integral outliner
Nisus :                  bigger, fast, most powerful, more complicated
MacWrite II 1.1 :   much bigger, slower,  but includes very nice help.
Word 4.0 :             humongous, too complicated, except easy table editing 
Full Write :           humongous, too complicated

Interestingly, no one mentioned Microsoft Write.

One respondent mentioned Microsoft Works:  "We have a MAC lab (25 machines)
using MacJanet and use MicroSoft Works for wordprocessing, spreadsheet, and db
work.  The load time is about equal to what you are currently seeing" [with
MacWrite 4.6].

Wolfgang N. Naegeli
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Internet: wnn@ornl.gov    Bitnet: wnn@ornlstc
Phone: 615-574-6143       Fax: 615-574-3895