AppleWorks

A productivity suite for the Apple II series of computers. AppleWorks 2.0 fit on a single 800K floppy, and was faster on a 1Mhz Apple IIe than Microsoft Word is on a Pentium 166Mhz. It was also the Apple II application with the best memory management (handling hundreds of segments of bank switch memory is not easy) and is a strong reason behind the Apple IIe's success.

I suspect that the reason appleworks on an apple IIe was faster was that appleworks was written in assembly language whereas Microsft Word was written in C.

Another factor could be operating system overhead. Windows is certainly a resource hog, while ProDos can't steal any processor time from the application, since it's a file system with no gui and doesn't run concurrently.