[2] The product changed hands in the aftermath of Ashton-Tate's early 1990s business failure, and most of its problems were addressed in a major upgrade in 1995.

The limitations of the machines, notably the small amount of memory, made it difficult to build significantly more powerful software that might attract a higher-end audience.

With the ending of the bundling arrangement, Ann Arbor Softworks decided to take on the MacPaint market with the release of FullPaint in 1986.

It followed the MacPaint interface closely, but allowed large images to be scrolled, added a number of new tools, and could open up to four documents at once to cut and paste between them.

MacWrite introduced a semi-WYSIWYG GUI to word processor users, and many of its conventions remain as standards today - selecting text with a drag of the mouse and then cutting it, for instance.

Among its many new features was multi-column layouts, flowing text around irregular objects (normally images), automatic creation of indexes and table of contents, among others.

It also, like FullPaint, more closely followed the Mac interface, allowing the user to work in a page view that exactly matched the output, as opposed to MacWrite's semi-WYSIWYG display.

[5] Another emerging concept that fed into the development of FullWrite was a number of recently introduced outliner products, notably the seminal MORE, released on the Mac in June 1986.

Outliners allowed the user to jot down quick topic headings and then expand them at any time, including the ability to re-arrange the document simply by dragging the appropriate header to a new location.

MORE led to significant interest in the market and the underlying concept of a hierarchical view that could be used to reorganize a document had a natural fit with long-document preparation that FullWrite was targeting.

Just prior to the January 1988 MacWorld Expo, where the company planned to ship the product, Ann Arbor was purchased by Ashton-Tate, with whom discussions had been underway for some time.

After minor edits to change the copyright notices from Ann-Arbor to Ashton-Tate and updating the packaging, the program finally shipped as version 1.1 on 27 April 1988,[9] at a suggested retail price of $395.

[12] This was at a time when most new Macs shipped with 1 MB and used floppies for storage, and when users were starting to take advantage of the multitasking features offered by System 6's MultiFinder, using up a portion of that RAM.

In response, Ann Arbor Softworks (which still existed to serve customers of its other products) sued Borland, complaining that Ashton-Tate had failed to market the program successfully.

[14] In late 1993 Borland sold off the product to Akimbo Systems, a small company started by Roy Leban, one of FullWrite's original developers.

[15] A greatly updated FullWrite 2.0 (dropping "Professional") followed early in 1995,[16] adding a number of new features including AppleScripting, importers/exporters based on Claris's XTND, a built-in table editor, an extensive and powerful plug-in architecture (including a pig Latin plug-in), and support for the "EGO Protocol" which used AppleEvents to allow in-place editing of graphics.

[17] Reviews were very positive; now the main concerns were the odd menu layout that made some commands difficult to find, and the lack of a cascading style system.

InfoWorld was highly impressed in their July 1988 review, saying that while it was "one of the longest anticipated software producing in computer history" that it was nevertheless "proves to be worth the wait."