It has been coming for some time, but now it has finally happened. AppleWorks is no more and users trying to get to the AppleWorks web site are now redirected to Apple’s new iWorks ’08 instead.

Apple released AppleWorks for the Apple II 8-bit live back in 1984 as an integrated product that featured word processing, database, and spreadsheet applications that were seamlessly combined into one application; this was really innovative back in those days. Over the years, AppleWorks was spun off as ClarisWorks as Apple got out of the software development business.

Claris even tried to bring ClarisWorks to the PC platform with a release of ClarisWorks for Windows in 1993, but it was never really that successful in the Windows environment.

Apple reacquired ClarisWorks and changed the name of the product to AppleWorks once again as Claris focused their development efforts on FileMaker Pro. As Apple move into the OS X era, they updated AppleWorks for OS X, but it was overshadowed by the new iWork applications, Pages and Keynote. Apple has been trying to get users adjusted to the idea that AppleWorks days were numbered and that the future was to be iWorks.

With the introduction of iWorks ’08, Apple now has added a new spreadsheet application called “Numbers” to the package, and users now have a completed bundle of applications from Apple to handle word processing, presentations and spreadsheets. These days, it is almost unheard of for software to stand the test of time, but 23 years is a long time for one application to survive.

While AppleWorks has evolved over the years the basic concepts and improvements continued to make it a favorite among the Apple set. The ease of use factor in many ways was the overriding factor that kept it around all of these years. We bid you farewell, AppleWorks; but, since we are not regular Apple users, we hardly knew you.