I started making Quill because I wanted to do real writing on my old Macs. I enjoy sitting down at one of these machines, which gives me a lot of nostalgia from when I was a kid. The general interface feels really familiar, there are fewer distractions compared to working on a modern computer, and the computer still feels perfectly capable of helping me get something done. What bothered me was trusting an aging hard drive with that work, then figuring out how to get it onto my modern computer. An unexpected crash is also rather less charming when it takes your afternoon’s writing with it.

I also got enthusiastic about the possibility of building new software for these machines with toolchains like retro68. That became a project of its own: how much of a useful, modern writing workflow could I bring back to a Macintosh SE/30? Then I got too enthusiastic and went overboard ....

Quill is the result of a month and a bit of working on a new platform. It has a native 68k application for System 7 onwards, a native PowerPC version for Mac OS 9, and a version for early PowerPC Mac OS X (via Carbon). The 68k editor fits on a floppy and works on a 512 × 342 black-and-white display. Using ethernet or even a BlueSCSI v2, the document is synced to the cloud while working.