He agreed to lead the MacWrite development team on a semi-official basis. The MacWrite development team was a company called Encore Systems, founded and led by Randy Wigginton, one of Apple's earliest employees, and included Don Breuner and Ed Ruder (co-founders of Encore Systems and also early Apple employees Gabreal Franklin later joined Encore Systems as President.) Wigginton, who had left Apple in 1981, maintained a relationship with many Apple employees, many of whom were on the Macintosh development team. The result was MacWrite and MacPaint, which shipped free with every Macintosh from 1984 to 1986. In order to fill this void, several members of the Mac team took it upon themselves to write simple applications to fill these roles until third-party developers published more full-fledged software. Users would end up with a computer that did nothing. This presented a problem to Apple: the Mac was due to be launched in 1983 (originally), with a new user interface paradigm, but no third-party software would be available for it, nor could users easily write their own. Having an approachable, consistent GUI was an advantage for the Mac platform, but unlike prior personal computers, the Mac was sold with no programming language built-in. Some of these programs may have presented a graphical user interface of their own, but on the Mac, users would instead be expected to stay in the standard GUI both for launching and running programs. Typical computers of the era booted into text-only DOS or BASIC command line environments, requiring the users to type in commands to run programs.

When the Mac was first being created, it was clear that users would interact with it differently from other personal computers.

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