4iconWordStar: The Creators

Arthur Clarke istheArthur Clarke, the science-fiction writer who gave us2001and that beastly computer named HAL. Seymour Rubinstein is a California businessman with only fleeting mentions outside the magazines of the computer trade. He is literate but not literary. When I talked to him, he had not read Clarke’s latest novel. Yet Seymour Rubinstein and a colleague played more than a small role in the the writing of2010; for they created WordStar, the word-processing program that Clarke uses.

WordStar is to micro software whatCitizen Kaneis to movies: it is old—by computer standards, anyway—but it’s one of the best of its kind.

If, when writing, Clarke wants to insert a phrase several sentences back, for instance, he can just zip the cursor to the proper place, then type in the addition. He needn’t enter a special “Editing” mode. Some WordStar rivals may break up your thoughts by making you change modes.

Moreover, with simple keystrokes, Clarke can insert, drop, and move whole paragraphs.

“I can make corrections without hesitation that I wouldn’t have done before,” Clarke said enthusiastically about WordStar and his Archives micro. “It’s at least doubled my production with a quarter of the effort.” His normal output for his books and articles was still around a thousand words a day, but WordStar had made his writing more fun, and now he was churning out letter after letter to “my neglected friends.”

“I said I’d retired,” he told me over the phone from his home in Sri Lanka, “but now I’m working on three or four things simultaneously. I haven’t touched a typewriter since I got this computer a year or so ago.”[16]You can easily understand why he hasn’t. No longer, for instance, does a noisy bell tell Clarke that he’s nearingthe right margin—he just keeps on typing and a feature calledword wrapautomatically takes him on to the next line.

Granted, WordStar is traditional software. It doesn’t useicons, for instance, those cute little pictures of wastebaskets or file folders that some snazzy new programs will flash across your screen to tell you what you’re doing. And as of this writing, anyway, the original WordStar didn’t offersplit screensto show more than one electronic file at once. WordStar 2000, a related but not identical program, does. First marketed in late 1984, it may supplant plain old WordStar eventually, but the original program will always have a special place in the hearts of the cognoscenti. It’s an indisputable classic. More than a million people have used WordStar since it appeared in 1979. Rubinstein and Rob Barnaby, the brilliant programmer who did the actual coding for WordStar, are legends.

As computer technology matures, the machines themselves will be mere commodities like televisions or Walkman imitations. It’s the programs that run on them which will make the difference.

WordStar is at least adequate, and mostly superb, in all but the last of these areas:

1. Absence of bugs. The software maker should have gotten all the bugs out so that the program will run reliably on your computer. You can’t write a complex program that will be absolutely bug-free. But you can make it bug-free 99 percent of the time.

2. General ease of use. A program should be easy enough to learnanduse. Being logical helps; ideally, you can use combinations of familiar commands to coax the program into doing many things that you haven’t done before.

3. Good documentation. The manual should be clear and logically organized. Either the simplest material should come earliest, or else there should be a beginner’s version; also, the manual should boast a good, comprehensive index.

4. Usefulness to beginners and old pros alike. You can adjust the best programs to suit your own level of skill with them.

5. Speed. It lets you do your job fast, especially when you use it with a hard disk.

6. Power. Related to speed. The program can quickly accomplish complicated tasks like substituting one word for another in a contract thousands of words long. Imagine the boon to lawyers plugging new names into standard boilerplate.

7. Fewer chances for botch-ups. Good programs limit the chances for careless errors in the first place.

8. The Jewish-uncle effect. Ideally, your software will slow you down or flash a warning when you’re about to ruin your work with a few taps on the wrong keys.

9. Damage limitations (if youdogoof).

10. After-the-goof feedback. After you’ve botched up—and we all do sooner or later—the program will tell you how you did so.

11. Ability to customize. You or at least a software expert can customize good programs foryouruse onyourmachine.

12. Availability of “accessory” programs to make your original software still more useful.

13. Support. Ideally, the software seller will stand behind his product if you have problems. MicroPro’s record here is far from the best; this may change.

Again, WordStar isn’t perfect (see BackupIII, “The Lucky 13,” for a more detailed description of it and criteria for choosing good software), but it comes closer than most other popular programs.

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Here are a few terms useful to people shopping for a word processor:1. Acursoris just the marker on your screen—a blinking line, maybe—that shows where a letter will appear when you type.Cursor keysmove the cursor up, down, left, or right.2. Afileis an electronic version of a letter, report, or other document or collection of data.3. Acontrol keyis what you start holding down to turn a letter or series of letters into commands for your computer. Used with the control key, the letters normally won’t show up in the document you’re typing. Some programs, by the way, may use the control key and anescapekey, which could be a way to get from one part of the program to another. Or the escape key may take on functions similar to the control key. In addition, there’s analternatekey that you may also use to help boss your machine around.4. Toscrolljust means to move from place to place in your electronic document. It’s like rolling or unrolling a Torah or other scroll, except here there’s no ink or paper, just patterns of electrons in your computer memory and dots on your screen. On most computer monitors you see only 24 lines of typing at a time.5. Amenulists commands on your screen. It can tell you how to locate a document on your disk or what to do while you’re at work there.6. Ablock moveis the ability to move material from one part of your document to another.7. Aglobal searchtracks down specified words in your document.8. Asearch and replacesubstitutes one word (or group of words) for another.

Here are a few terms useful to people shopping for a word processor:

1. Acursoris just the marker on your screen—a blinking line, maybe—that shows where a letter will appear when you type.Cursor keysmove the cursor up, down, left, or right.

2. Afileis an electronic version of a letter, report, or other document or collection of data.

3. Acontrol keyis what you start holding down to turn a letter or series of letters into commands for your computer. Used with the control key, the letters normally won’t show up in the document you’re typing. Some programs, by the way, may use the control key and anescapekey, which could be a way to get from one part of the program to another. Or the escape key may take on functions similar to the control key. In addition, there’s analternatekey that you may also use to help boss your machine around.

4. Toscrolljust means to move from place to place in your electronic document. It’s like rolling or unrolling a Torah or other scroll, except here there’s no ink or paper, just patterns of electrons in your computer memory and dots on your screen. On most computer monitors you see only 24 lines of typing at a time.

5. Amenulists commands on your screen. It can tell you how to locate a document on your disk or what to do while you’re at work there.

6. Ablock moveis the ability to move material from one part of your document to another.

7. Aglobal searchtracks down specified words in your document.

8. Asearch and replacesubstitutes one word (or group of words) for another.

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WordStar’s creators, Seymour Rubinstein and Rob Barnaby, are like Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz ofCitizen Kane. The movie would have been hack melodrama without the brilliance of both the producer-director and his writer; and yet critics still argue overKane’s exact origins. So it is with WordStar. WhenTimesaid Rubinstein had written the program, a friend of Barnaby’s whipped off an angry letter to the editor. I won’t take sides here. Rubinstein, however, far from playing down Barnaby’s WordStar role to me, unhesitatingly passed on his phone number when I asked. Barnaby is equally willing to acknowledge the importance of his collaborator. Even the letter writer emphasizes the usefulness of Rubinstein’s salesmanship and his perception of the software market back in the late 1970s when WordStar was born.

A short, stocky, bespectacled man in his fifties, Rubinstein grew up in New York City, the son of a pinball- and novelty-machine owner who died while Seymour was still in grade school. His mother worked as a clerk. “My first job,” Rubinstein said, “was a helper on a fruit truck when I was twelve years old.” Two years later, however, his neighbors were “letting me ruin their radios,” and by his mid-twenties, he seemed settled into the routine of a TV repairman.

But Rubinstein grew restless after six months’ reserve military duty in the 1950s; he attended night school at Brooklyn College and took up technical writing.

Decades later he recalled a navigational computer he encountered while a civilian, speaking as if it were his “Rosebud,” as if he were Charles Kane thinking about the Colorado snows and the name on his childhood sled. He gave me the machine’s exact measurements, eight by nine by twelve inches. Then, mixing nostalgia with awe, he said, “If you opened it up, it would look like a Swiss watchmaker’s nightmare, all those gears and little electronic things whirring and clicking away. But with it you could take off from an aircraft carrier and circle overhead and press the reset button and fly anywhere you wanted, and wherever you flew,an indicator kept track of how far you were from that spot on the ocean and told how you could return.” Ask Rubinstein about his early career and you may hear more talk of machines than of people. “$2” The hardware, however, helped make the man. Rubinstein spent years working with data-communications networks—the ones that, for instance, handle airline reservations or credit-card information. Without quick, accurate updating, thesereal-timesystems are worthless: just ask anyone whom an airline has booked on an already-full flight. You could have the best-designed computers in the cosmos. But the question in the end may be “Did the airline clerk key in reservations for you on the right flight at the right time?” And Rubinstein’s software philosophy later reflected his real-time work. He originally did not intend WordStar for the bumbling and the lazy but for “the production typist” on whom the boss heavily counted for both speed and accuracy.

In my last interview with Rubinstein for this book, he downplayed his statement that he created WordStar for the fleet-fingered typist. “I believe that everyone deserves a product appropriate to his particular classification,” he said, “and while WordStar may have been aimed at a particular niche, that is not to say we shouldn’t enlarge the scope of this product.... We’re going to make the next version easier to learn.” As thousands of professionals and executives can verify, however, WordStar all along has been quite learnable.

Early in his computer career Rubinstein also grasped the importance of clear documentation to guide people through the programs. IBM at the time was one of the world’s largest publishers, at least in sheer volume of paper consumed, ranking right up near Random House and other giants, and Rubinstein recalls the old manuals as abysmal: “You really had to have a lot of drive and patience to get through their stuff.” Programmers rose or fell according to their ability to push through “arbitrary collections of material arranged in an arbitrary order.” Rubinstein, who by now had forsaken technical writing for programming, made a discovery helpful to any software user: you won’t serve yourself best, necessarily, by completely memorizing the manuals. The trick, rather, is to know where to turn in a hurry when youdohave a problem.

In 1977, wandering through a store for computer hobbyists in San Rafael, California, Rubinstein saw a box with blue-and-red switches and lights, and “it looked really interesting. I went home, built it, and a week later I had a computer.”[17]

It was his first micro, perhaps more of his Rosebud, after all, than the navigational computer.

“I had spent many hours of my life in very brightly lit, cold rooms in the middle of the night, surrounded by millions of dollars’ worth of junk,” he once recalled. And yet his new dwarf seemed “a true computer” to him “in every sense of the word. I could see the potential, and I got very excited.”[18]His elation grew when he saw that a company named IMSAI, run by an old boss, had produced the kit. He once remembered the firm, now defunct, as “one of the tiny companies that really made this industry happen. The industry did not happen by some big, famous manufacturer deciding this was what he was going to do. It was a grass-roots movement.”[19]

Rubinstein joined IMSAI as software-products manager and within two months was marketing director; there he signed the first contract between a computer manufacturer and Digital Research for CP/M, the popular operating system—the only one with which WordStar at first would work.

Leaving IMSAI in 1978, Rubinstein “knew exactly what I wanted todo.”do.”He would “build packaged software” for businessmen and others unfamiliar with computerarcanaarcana. Registering out a business name in June, he included “International” after “MicroPro” because “I felt that with the right, well-designed products, Europe would be an approachable market.”[20]

Rubinstein was barely out of the IMSAI fold when he dropped by Rob Barnaby’s flat in Berkeley, California. The two had met at IMSAI, which Barnaby had left a short time earlier, for different reasons, after hot words between the moody young programmer and his boss. Barnaby was a Harvard graduate, a physics major, a tennis pro’s son, the descendant of an old New England family. A pattern in his life was seemingly emerging by the time he reached his thirties; he would throw himself into computer jobs, program masterfully for a while, then find his interest waning. Just before joining IMSAI, Barnaby had been fixing up old houses. “I kind of like creating things with computers and forgetting them and getting away from them when I’m not creating something new,”Barnaby told me. He was in no hurry, quite likely, to return to work after IMSAI, having salted away a good part of his salary. “I like the flexibility that saving money produces.” He isn’t materialistic—the very antithesis of it. And yet money and WordStar are together a touchy subject. Barnaby’s work for MicroPro seemingly did not make him rich, at least not California rich.

“It was originally royalties,” Barnaby said, “and when the royalties played out, I took a salary and a stock option.” His total earnings from MicroPro were somewhere in the six figures.

“I want you to understand where his ego is,” said the friend who wroteTime. “He’s often chided by people for allowing himself to be taken advantage of and he simply does not want to discuss it. He says, ‘I made a deal. I kept my promise, Seymour kept his promise and that’s it.’” Describing the circumstances in a peculiarly Californian way, the friend said: “If Seymour was really greedy he would have gone to Rob two years ago and said something like, ‘Hey, you got to believe me, Rob, I never expected this thing would ever do what it’s done. And I’d like to do right by you and so I would like you to graciously accept this check for $150,000 I brought with me here today.’ Then Seymour would have owned him. Rob did not get rich writing WordStar. People think that, but it’s simply not true. I’ve seen it. The guy’s a friend of mine. He’s back to work again because of financial need.”

“We were both very poor,” Rubinstein told me earlier about himself and Barnaby. “I had less than $8,500 to my name, in fact, but I gave Rob a $2,500 retainer, a third of my cash reserves. I owned a house, but the bank owned most of it.”

Rubinstein offered to make Barnaby a partner. Barnaby, characteristically wary of entanglements, turned him down.

An early program Barnaby did for Rubinstein was a programmer’s aid, which, among other things, let you move words and numbers around more easily on the screen. It was no more a word processor than a pencil. Nor did Barnaby intend it to be one: “I was writing a program editor, a tool for me.” Yet “computer stores would be trying to sell people something they could write letters with, and it would get back to Seymour that our program definitely did not have those features.” Rubinstein recalls taking a big hint from dealers’ enthusiasm for a program called Electric Pencil. “What they liked,” he said, “was you could both enter and print from the same program, and you had a lot of control over the printout. You could specify things like underlining and margin settings, but it was very primitive. You certainly couldn’t imagine what it would be like until you printed it. You didn’t know where page breaks would occur, where one page would end and another began,” and so you might have to print several times before yougot it right, since each change might create new breaks in the wrong places. That was micro word processing 1970s style. You either put up with all these nasty details or prayed for a sweepstakes killing so you could buy a $20,000 “dedicated” machine from IBM or Wang.

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When You Should Buy a Dedicated Word ProcessorHere are some times when you should seriously consider it:1. When you work for a stuffy old bureaucracy that’s rich and afraid of the new.2. When you’re a procurement officer on probation. As they say, no one’s lost his job for buying Xerox rather than Brand Non-X. Then again, your boss maybawlbawlyou out for not buying a Xeroxmicro.3. When you want to dump the training problems in the manufacturer’s lap. Of course, many independent companies and consultants nowadays are training people to use micros, especially IBMs.4. When you prefer an extra-large, extra-sharp screen and giant memory and when you can’t easily find micros of comparable quality. Here, too, I’m skeptical. The gap between micro hardware and the dedicateds is narrowing.5. When you’re looking for a machine that will run special software that the micros won’t. Fondly, a Hollywood writer-director tells of a script-formating program “dreamed up by some lunatic in northern California.” Nowadays, however,moremoreprogrammers are writing for micros than for dedicated word processors.You should think “Micro” if you’re working for (1) yourself, (2) a needy company or organization, or (3) a rich, frugal one.“But,” you ask, “what about repair?”Well, surprise: many big companies—including Xerox itself—are now in the micro repair business.Besides, for the price of one dedicated, you might buy both a micro and a backup.

When You Should Buy a Dedicated Word Processor

Here are some times when you should seriously consider it:

1. When you work for a stuffy old bureaucracy that’s rich and afraid of the new.

2. When you’re a procurement officer on probation. As they say, no one’s lost his job for buying Xerox rather than Brand Non-X. Then again, your boss maybawlbawlyou out for not buying a Xeroxmicro.

3. When you want to dump the training problems in the manufacturer’s lap. Of course, many independent companies and consultants nowadays are training people to use micros, especially IBMs.

4. When you prefer an extra-large, extra-sharp screen and giant memory and when you can’t easily find micros of comparable quality. Here, too, I’m skeptical. The gap between micro hardware and the dedicateds is narrowing.

5. When you’re looking for a machine that will run special software that the micros won’t. Fondly, a Hollywood writer-director tells of a script-formating program “dreamed up by some lunatic in northern California.” Nowadays, however,moremoreprogrammers are writing for micros than for dedicated word processors.

You should think “Micro” if you’re working for (1) yourself, (2) a needy company or organization, or (3) a rich, frugal one.

“But,” you ask, “what about repair?”

Well, surprise: many big companies—including Xerox itself—are now in the micro repair business.

Besides, for the price of one dedicated, you might buy both a micro and a backup.

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Psyching out the market, Rubinstein not only listened to computer-store owners but read up on the features of the dedicateds, determined to match them.

In some ways, in fact, he hoped to surpass these rivals. From the very beginning he was against built-in function keys features, believing that they actually slowed down typists by forcing them to take their hands off their main keyboards.

Pitting himself against IBM and the other giants of the word-processing world, Barnaby worked in a spare bedroom from which he evicted an electric-train set. He wrote the WordStar with a brand-new IMSAI computer, 64K RAM, two 530K disks. His big, fat Teletype Model 40 printer crawled along at a pokey 10 characters per second, but he poured out his code as if he were a muse-inspired novelist.

“Working out whatever it was he was going to code,” Rubinstein recalled, “he would sit in front of the machine and his fingers would fly. And he would actually growl at the machine with his chin jutted out—rrr, rrr, like that—and he would pound the keys as fast as he could go, because he couldn’t get into the machine fast enough.” Between fall 1978 and summer 1979 Barnaby typically worked eighteen hours a day on WordStar, and sometimes many more in the frenzy of it all. Rubinstein said, “I stayed up a few nights with him, in fact. He was younger than I was—still is,” he said dryly, “so I couldn’t do it as much as he could. He was an excellent coder, one of the best I’ve ever seen in terms of speed and accuracy and putting in features that are real clever.”

Barnaby, in turn, praises Rubinstein’s contributions to WordStar. “Seymour set the general goals. I wouldn’t have known what the world wanted because I’m not in touch with the world. He gave me a lot of specifics. He was probably the person who used WordStar the most and gave me the most comments, because he bridges the range from being able to understand where technical people’s heads are at and being able to relate to the outside world and the market. He was a programmer years ago. He’s familiar with the process I go through. He doesn’t like to do it anymore, but he sort of understands what I’m doing. I think the menus were his idea”—the instructions that pop up on the screen if the typist takes too much time to execute a WordStar command. Rubinstein also recalls contributing touches like the Q effect, which accelerates the impact of other WordStar commands; and he says he thought up the dotted lines that cross the screen to mark page breaks. No matter who did what for WordStar, however, it’s likely that Barnaby, regardless of Rubinstein’s helpful studies of the market, was writing mostly for Barnaby. “I don’t hear a voice from the world,” he generalized to me about his coding habits. “I hear a voice from the back of my head.”

Rob Barnaby, you might say, was WordStar’s first user. He used WordStar as a programmingaidaidto write WordStar. Thenhe used WordStar to write the manual for WordStar.

As we talked, I realized how close his working habits came to mine and how, coding WordStar for himself and Rubinstein, he had also programmed it for me. It was not so much a fluke that the program’s logic coincided with mine. So, in many ways, did Barnaby’s personal writing habits. “I fiddle around a lot with text,” he said. “I try to get the points down, and then I try to get good sentences to say them with. If I find I try to word the thing right from the start, I lose it. I must see things on the screen.” Amen, Rob. I don’t write my best English inside my head, either; I, too, mustsee. Like me, Barnaby might have loathed the programs that didn’t let you zip the cursor to an error and correct it without much ado.

The creation of WordStar, by the way, wasn’t the only act of genius from MicroPro. The name was a marketer’s dream. Why “WordStar”?

MicroPro already had the programmer’s aid called WordMaster, and Rubinstein apparently held an informal name-this-product contest for the new word processor.

“Who’s this for?” asked an employee named Barbara.

“It’s really for the production-minded secretary,” he replied.

“Why don’t you call it Word—?” she said, using a vulgar synonym for “cat.”

“What?”

Barbara mulled it over. “Maybe that’s a little too risqué. But you say the secretary’s the hero?”

“Yes,” said Rubinstein.

“The star?”

“Yes.”

“Then why not call it WordStar?”

And so it was.

Hitting the marketplace in the summer of 1979, the product clicked; no competitor came close; at least none offered WordStar’s get-what-you-see printing features.

Rubinstein had come out with good, timely software, and now he was riding the beginnings of the micro wave. Just as with VisiCalc, buyers soon asked about WordStar by name—before they bought their computers. In fact, often it waswhythey bought micros. And Rubinstein found WordStar wasn’t merely a good first sale for dealers. Frequently, it would be a second. Balking at WordStar’s price, customers would make do with an inferior word processor but remember the sales reps’ original praise of the MicroPro program.

Ironically, as WordStar was taking off, Barnaby, its writer, was headed toward another burnout. The atmosphere around MicroProwas changing. Rubinstein, who eventually would name a yacht theMicroStarand move into a hilltop home with a sunken tile tub, was losing touch with some programmers. “They locked us up in this little windowless room with Customer Support,” recalled Jim Fox, Barnaby’s former assistant, who worked on WordStar Version 3.0, the one I’m using. “It was messy. It was very noisy—not very good air circulation. And then they were expecting us to do programming. Rob asked months and months for shelves, and they never gave them until he threw a temper tantrum.” It seemed strange for Rubinstein to let this happen. Everyone agrees that $400,000 home or not, he was the opposite of a golf-course president. And yet Rubinstein had burdened MicroPro with high-tech bureaucrats who were turning it into a mini-Washington, inflicting reorganization after reorganization. The real producers, whether sales reps or programmers, sometimes suffered. Barnaby quit in the summer of 1980 just after working on an important sister program of WordStar, MailMerge, which helps businesses personalize letters with names plugged in from mail lists. “To my knowledge,” Rubinstein told me in early 1983, “he has not coded anything of significance since.”

Rubinstein was telling the truth as he knew it. Barnaby, indeed, had largely forgotten about computers. He had lost excess weight; he had traveled; he had stopped smoking and shaved off his beard. In superficial ways he seemed a different man from the writer of WordStar. And yet Barnaby had left software before and returned; and in late 1982, unknown to Rubinstein apparently, he had again.

It wasn’t just that he needed the money. He could no longer flee computerdom so easily. A barrier had tumbled, the one between his work and the rest of the world. Once micros had been mostly hobbyists’ toys, demanding hours of soldering and programming. Many of his friends hadn’t fathomed what he did. But now Barnaby was hearing a woman—formerly perplexed—say that WordStar was the rage at the stores where she was shopping for her new business computer. Barnaby’s father got2010for Christmas and read that Arthur Clarke had written it with WordStar; Clarke had sent the book to New York on a five-inch floppy and transmitted final corrections from Sri Lanka through his computer over a satellite link. Another science-fiction leader, I discovered, also was hoping to catch up with2010—Seymour Rubinstein.

Returned to computers, bearded again, Barnaby in early 1983 was working for a small rival of MicroPro, Chang Laboratories, aiming at the lucrative market for software compatible with IBM’s 16-bit PC. He was like a canny Hollywood scriptwriter. Barnaby was somewhat vague about his software plans, in part because he really did not know what he would create in the end, but perhapsalso because he did not want to alert the competition. He would not, in early 1983, say he was working on a new word processor, only that he was at the keyboard of his new IBM. It ran WordStar. Barnaby, like thousands of other people, had bought his IBM version at a local ComputerLand store. You might say it was the neat completion of a circle, for the founder of the ComputerLand chain was none other than Bill Millard, the man behind IMSAI, Barnaby’s former employer.

Barnaby offered his opinion of the WordStar version he had bought at ComputerLand—competent but unimaginative. Well, how could he outdo his WordStar? Barnaby answered, and despite his refusal to be pinned down on a future project (“It could be a spreadsheet”), he gave at least an inkling of what another word processor from him could be like.

Among other things, Barnaby would take advantage of the newer machines’ more powerful memories; he’d write more instructions for the RAM. So he wouldn’t have to choose as much between making the program either (1) more easily understood or (2) capable of moving around words in the fastest or most efficient way. Smart computers and dumb humans could coexist more gracefully.

Also, he’d reduce the number of commands in WordStar, a good idea if not overdone. “I’ve thought, Gee, couldn’t I have only two or three ways of deleting text rather than twenty. And I look at my habits, and I do use a lot of them. But most of them I could replace with the same number of keystrokes or only one more keystroke using a combination of other commands. I’d never tried to write a program where you didn’t have to read the manual before. And I still don’t think I’ve succeeded. I think that’s a worthy goal for the future—to write a program that doesn’t have to have amanual.”manual.”

Back at MicroPro, Rubinstein, by early 1983, had fallen behind some previous goals of his own. Fewer than 250 people worked for the company, or less than half the peak number, and the company had saddled itself earlier with hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in office leases it no longer needed. “There were some odd things that happened internally with these visions of increasing numbers of sales,” said a former MicroPro man, “and they hired too many people too quickly. They pay very well, and their salesmen were getting incredible commissions. I know one guy—his first month in sales he took home five grand in commissions.” Did he sustain that amount? “He didn’t,” said the ex-MicroPro employee. “Every month after that he fell.” And so, it seemed, did the sales rep’s colleagues at MicroPro. “They kept trying to break record after record,” the former employee recalled,“and the only way to do it was to extend generous credit and get their products out the door.... They had to produce all the programs people ordered, but they weren’t getting their money immediately.” With high interest rates, some buyers would stall payments as long as possible. MicroPro’s growth problems weren’t unique. Another pioneer in micro software, Lifeboat Associates, a distributor, also found itself overexpanded and laid off employees.

MicroPro likewise suffered when programmers, ordered to meet Rubinstein’s deadline, cut corners on an early version of WordStar for the IBM PC. The software was too hard to adapt to customers’ printers. And then IBM threw MicroPro a loop. It suddenly changed the PC’s operating system in a way that made WordStar glitch up. MicroPro wasn’t the culprit here. And yet it was the one receiving angry phone calls from frustrated customers. It was, in a sense, a victim of its own reputation for quality. MicroPro products had bugs like other software makers’, but fewer of them than most, so that the IBM WordStar problems—since corrected—enraged customers with high expectations.

Old friends of Rubinstein’s, meanwhile, complained that the firm had nothing truly original coming out, that MicroPro had evolved from a programming company to a marketing one. I disagreed somewhat. MicroPro had succeeded largelybecauseRubinstein had aggressively sold himself and his programs. And yet it was also true no other MicroPro product had commanded as much attention as WordStar, the first big one. Michael Canyes, a computer consultant, complained that it was “getting a little gray around the temples.” It was time for updates, drastic ones. If they didn’t come, if competitors kept duplicating various features of WordStar, the program would eventually perish.

So far, however, that hadn’t happened.

Nothing had appeared that was both as good as WordStar and marketed as successfully.

“If you’d asked me when I first introduced it,” Barnaby said, “I would have said as soon as we stopped moving, somebody would have done something better. I sort of thought WordStar would be gone by now, but it’s growing instead. It may sell a million by the time it’s done.” He wasn’t bragging; he was right.

We were talking now in summer 1983. Barnaby had removed himself from the payroll of Chang Laboratories, and I suspected it might be because he worried about living up to his first success. Barnaby didn’t discourage that impression. When asked if another WordStar might be on its way, he said, “I hit once; I may not hit again.” I understood. He was no different from a writer trying to create another blockbuster book or movie; he would be competing against himself—a contest made more difficult by the fact thatMicroPro’s marketing expertise would no longer be on his side. I suggested that he and Rubinstein might both benefit by working together again as a team. If Barnaby agreed, though, he certainly didn’t make that clear to me, and I hung up thinking that the Barnaby-Rubinstein collaboration was as dead as the Welles-Mankiewicz one.

“Let’s just put it this way,” said Barnaby of MicroPro. “They could have made me happier there and I’d still be there, and MicroPro would still be growing instead of being flat.”

“Rob is beloved around here,” said a public relations woman at MicroPro when I suggested that the company might benefit from his return, “but we have many other good programmers.”

Not long afterward I was talking to Seymour Rubinstein. He was decidedly more upbeat about MicroPro’s fortune than Barnaby had been. He had added some fifty people to his staff since we’d last talked. Rubinstein predicted record sales of about $42 million in 1983, of which WordStar would be 65 percent; he expected that his word processor would thrive inside the ROMs of $1,500 lap-sized computers.

During our conversation I expressed my astonishment over a newspaper article; supposedly, a programmer—unnamed—had dreamed up WordStar in a week or so during vacation.

“I was amazed to see it myself,” Rubinstein said. “It was really romanticizing something in a way that wasn’t necessary, beyond not being true.”

“I talked to Barnaby,” I said, “and he has the normal worries of programmers and writer-writers—whether he can ever repeat his success. And I still wonder about the chances of you two coming together again.”

“Well,” Rubinstein said without the slightest pause, “I got him back working again.”

“Now?”

“Yep.”

“When?”

“Just started a week and a half ago.”

“Christ,” I said, “I sort of popped the question to him.”

“I’d just as soon you didn’t broadcast it,” Rubinstein said. “He’s not in solid yet, but I expect he will be. You can put in there a blurb that as of this writing Barnaby came back for a test run to see whether he could get involved again.”

“As a WordStar user,” I said, “I have a selfish interest in his developing it further. Will he be working on WordStar?”

“He’ll be working on WordStar,” said Rubinstein. Like a movie man, he excitedly described his coming attraction. (“It’ll just knock their socks off.”) The new WordStar would contain a spreadsheet.Also, used with the right printers, it would offer proportional spacing, meaning that an “I” would take up less room than a “W,” making the print look more booklike. What’s more, the new WordStar would be simpler to learn. Listening to Rubinstein raving over his forthcoming word processor, I could tell that if Barnaby didn’t work out on the new project, MicroPro might use someone else. Ideally, however, it wouldn’t. “Just incredible,” Rubinstein had said of Barnaby’s coding of WordStar. “The man is a consummate artist.”

Surely, I thought, Arthur Clarke would agree.

Barnaby stayed some months with MicroPro. In fact, he had helped fit WordStar into the little memory of the Epson lap-sized portable marketed that year. A micro magazine, meanwhile, came out with a report that a version of WordStar for big machines, Version 4.0, might contain split screens. In October 1984, however, I was still waiting. And Rob Barnaby had left MicroPro in July.

“Things didn’t click,” he said without going into the specifics. “We talked about a lot of things, but they didn’t jell.” He was now consulting.

MicroPro suffered in other ways. Yearly income was up 53 percent, and the company was still shipping thirty thousand copies of WordStar each month, but quarterly revenues reported in September 1984 were $12.4 million versus $15.6 million for the same period in 1983. The company sustained a loss in earnings of six cents a share, $756,000. Hoping to cope with threats such as NewWord, which sold for $250 and used the same commands as the older word processor, it laid off 10 percent of its workers and reduced WordStar’s list price from $495 to $350. NewWord even offered twists of its own. You could tell it to go to a certain page number, for instance, without having to specify a word on the page you were looking for. The natural question arose: Why should people pay $100 more for the real WordStar?

■ ■ ■

Six Reasons Why Customers (or Noncustomers) Feel Free to Cheat Software Companies

WordStar clones like NewWord aren’t illegal. Getting a “free” WordStar from a friend, however, is.“It’s like illegally getting a second typewriter—copied from a friend’s, down to the serial number,” a software columnist observes. “You’re stealing a valuable tool.” H. Glen Haney, thepresident of MicroPro, told me that most copies of WordStar in use arebootleggedones.While opposing the practice, I’ll list six reasons why customers cheat:1. It takes all of two or three minutes—maybe less—to copy a disk worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Yes, anti-bootlegging gimmicks exist. But often theyreducesoftware sales; would you be as keen to buy a $500 disk if you couldn’t easily make backups?2. Everyone does it.3. Computer users want to befriend others with similar machines so they can draw on them for technical hints or back up equipment.And what better way to cement a new friendship than at a copying session where the users swap programs? That’s the thinking.4. Many software companies overprice their wares. Yes, it’s expensive to develop good programs; but some companies, rather than creating innovative products, gouge you to pay for development of copycat offerings. They themselves rip off people—their more imaginative rivals. (No criticism of NewWord here. It is much cheaper than the original WordStar and offers some improvements.)5. Some people in large companies think software houses don’t give big-enough discounts to corporations buying the same program for a number of machines.6. Many software companies don’t offer enough guidance or other help. Customers think, Why should I buy this program when they’re just going to ignore my problems once they have my money? The columnist counters: “That’s like saying, ‘I’ll just throw out the old Judeo-Christian ethic that it’s wrong to steal.’ The other guy being wrong doesn’t make you right.”

WordStar clones like NewWord aren’t illegal. Getting a “free” WordStar from a friend, however, is.

“It’s like illegally getting a second typewriter—copied from a friend’s, down to the serial number,” a software columnist observes. “You’re stealing a valuable tool.” H. Glen Haney, thepresident of MicroPro, told me that most copies of WordStar in use arebootleggedones.

While opposing the practice, I’ll list six reasons why customers cheat:

1. It takes all of two or three minutes—maybe less—to copy a disk worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Yes, anti-bootlegging gimmicks exist. But often theyreducesoftware sales; would you be as keen to buy a $500 disk if you couldn’t easily make backups?

2. Everyone does it.

3. Computer users want to befriend others with similar machines so they can draw on them for technical hints or back up equipment.

And what better way to cement a new friendship than at a copying session where the users swap programs? That’s the thinking.

4. Many software companies overprice their wares. Yes, it’s expensive to develop good programs; but some companies, rather than creating innovative products, gouge you to pay for development of copycat offerings. They themselves rip off people—their more imaginative rivals. (No criticism of NewWord here. It is much cheaper than the original WordStar and offers some improvements.)

5. Some people in large companies think software houses don’t give big-enough discounts to corporations buying the same program for a number of machines.

6. Many software companies don’t offer enough guidance or other help. Customers think, Why should I buy this program when they’re just going to ignore my problems once they have my money? The columnist counters: “That’s like saying, ‘I’ll just throw out the old Judeo-Christian ethic that it’s wrong to steal.’ The other guy being wrong doesn’t make you right.”

■ ■ ■

MicroPro’s responded to such competition by keeping WordStar but developing another word processor, WordStar 2000, aimed at offices that had shunned micros as too hard to use.

WordStar 2000, named because MicroPro said it would stay modern into the next century, discarded most of the older program’s commands. There wasn’t one line of code from plain old WordStar. And WordStar 2000 couldn’t easily read its files—imperiling an industry standard that MicroPro itself had created.Moreover, it couldn’t run on less advanced micros like the Kaypro II. Machines in that vein were still good for word processing, and critics claimed that MicroPro had kissed off the 8-bit market. MicroPro replied that it had wanted to take full advantage of the hard disks and other capabilities that were showing up in powerful new computers such as the IBM AT.[21]WordStar 2000 did not run well on the slower floppy-disk machines. Its early version was pokey, moreover, even on an IBM XT hard disk computer. However, it indeed simplified WordStar’s commands and offered split screens, a form-letter program, a spelling checker that you could use as you typed a letter rather than having to leave the file to call up the speller, proportional spacing, underlining displayed on the screen, and the ability to go to specified pages—in other words, what one writer called “a catalog of wishes” for people using the older program. WordStar 2000 lacked a spreadsheet and sold for an outrageously steep $595; for $100 more you could buy WordStar 2000 Plus, which included a simple list-keeping program and software to help hook you up to other computers via phone. A slogan captured the MicroPro sales pitch: “Easy Word Processing You’ll Never Outgrow.” WordStar 2000 wasn’t “easy” word processing—all powerful products took some time to learn—but it waseasierthan plain old WordStar.

I went to a MicroPro dealers’ meeting just outside Washington in early November 1984 and saw a slick, professional sales campaign that would have done a shaving-cream maker proud. Company officials, including president H. Glen Haney, said WordStar 2000 wasn’t a fluke: “We’re going to repeat this process again and again.” Educators, even science-fiction writers, were said to have helped forty programmers make The Product easy to use. MicroPro billed 2000 as having been “beyond the capabilities of one or two genius programmers.” This philosophy, as much as anything, perhaps explained why Rob Barnaby was no longer with the company. Like many talented people, especially writers, he was the very antithesis of a team man. There was a difference between being one of forty programmers andrrring away in front of the keyboard at midnight while the head of the company watched. And yet as a user of WordStar I still hoped that Barnaby might return to the MicroPro fold. No matter how many creativity experts MicroPro brought in—and the company in fact had experimented with one—you could no more replicate a Rob Barnaby than you could a Welles or Mankiewicz. It was entirely inevitable that the MicroPro officials at the Twin Bridges Marriott felt compelled tosay that 2000 was beyond one or two genius programmers. WordStar 2000 indeed hadsomemerits. Still, it was far from the earthshaker that the original WordStar had been. Barnaby and Rubinstein had so brilliantly conceived their program that it could hold back the competition for years and years.

Well into the 2000 presentation at the motel, the room darkened. It was movie time. The dealers chuckled at “word processing throughout the ages.” A cartoon caveman wrote on stone, a Greek shuffled around stones bearing inscriptions for a temple, and a cartoon George Patton barked orders to the troops as part of a pun based on the phrase “command-driven word processor.” (See Chapter 5 for a definition.) MicroPro officials trotted out advertisements that would appear in theWall Street Journal,Fortune,Time, and other major publications. The company was as proud of the ads as of WordStar 2000. A lie-detectorlike device, measuring electricity in the body, had even gauged test subjects’ responses to the copywriters’ creations.

After lunch—salad, roast beef, potatoes, and a redemptive low-calorie dessert—MicroPro let the dealers try out WordStar 2000 themselves on IBM XTs and ATs. It was a combination sales talk and seminar. MicroPro quizzed the dealers with questions in the vein of “What do you like most about the product?” The session greatly increased the dealers’—and my own—understanding of 2000. At the same time, using a teacher-student relationship, MicroPro people fortified their depiction of themselves as the world’s top experts on word processing.

Similar dog-and-pony shows would take place in cities across the country and overseas. MicroPro by now had four hundred employees worldwide and thirty-five hundred retail dealer outlets—a far cry from the days when Rob Barnaby had been writing WordStar in the room from which he’d displaced the electric-train set. If WordStar 2000 didn’t sell well, however, MicroPro would shrink into just another software company. It was a crucial time. MicroPro was deemphasizing products like data bases and spreadsheets, flaunting its reliance on word processing, and inspiring headlines like “MicroPro Back to Its Roots.”

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