Together with MacPaint, MacDraw, and MacProject, one of the early applications shipped by Apple Computer with the Macintosh after its introduction in 1984. Though its feature set was rudimentary by modern standards, its graphical user interface (GUI) was considered very impressive at the time.
The applications distributed with the original Macintosh were intended not only to do useful work -- they were also supposed to prove the superiority of the Mac's then-revolutionary mouse and GUI. Therefore, at the insistance of Steve Jobs, MacWrite included no ability for cursor control by keyboard. If you wanted to move the cursor, you had to use the mouse. This created an opening for Microsoft, as the original version of Microsoft Word was a clone of MacWrite but with control codes for moving the cursor from the keyboard.