>From "Computer Shopper Magazine"

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http://www.zdnet.com/computershopper/edit/cshopper/content/9807/318209.html

What Ever Happened to... WordStar?

by John C. Dvorak

One of the most interesting stories in the history of computing surrounds  
the dominant word processor of the late 1970s and early '80s: WordStar. The  
brain behind the product was industry pioneer Seymour Rubenstein, who also  
developed a spreadsheet program initially called Surpass and later named  
Quattro Pro. Rubenstein worked with his mentor Bill Millard at IMSAI, where  
he met superstar assembly-language coder Rob Barnaby.

After his stint with IMSAI, Rubenstein decided to start a software company,  
which he named Micropro International. The first two products released by  
this company were a word processor and a sorting program, which he recruited  
Barnaby to code. In just a few months, while coding two products  
simultaneously, Barnaby produced Supersort and Wordmaster. Both were released  
in September 1978 at a computer show in New York. Rubenstein made a $12,000  
profit at the show and was officially in business.

According to Rubenstein, Barnaby was the "mad genius of assembly-language  
coding," and his later work proved it.

Words Into Type

Word processors at the time typically employed separate programs for  
printing the documents after you edited them. The Electric Pencil, arguably  
the first modern word processor, incorporated printing into the program, and  
dealers wanted the Micropro product to do the same thing.

In October 1978, a month after its introduction, Barnaby began coding  
WordStar. In four months, Barnaby wrote 137,000 lines of bullet-proof  
assembly-language code. Rubenstein later checked with some friends from IBM  
who calculated that Barnaby's output was equal to 42 man years.

Sales and Storm

Sales were flying for WordStar and Micropro. For the fiscal year 1979, the  
company earned $500,000. Sales jumped to $1.8 million in 1980 and then to  
$5.2 million in 1981. Micropro then ported the product from CP/M to CP/M-86  
and PC-DOS, and released it for the IBM PC in April 1982, when sales  
skyrocketed to $23 million. It reached $45 million in 1983. In 1984, just as  
the company was going public, the sales were up to $70 million. At the time,  
Micropro was the largest software company in the country.

Two months before the public offering in 1984, however, disaster struck  
Rubenstein: He suffered a heart attack. In 1980, he made the mistake of  
bringing in a venture capitalist named Fred Adler whom he had met through his  
brother's brother-in-law.

"It was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life," Rubenstein says. Adler  
sent Fred Haney into Rubenstein's hospital room with a document to sign. The  
paper was an agreement to convert all his stock into non-voting stock "or the  
public offering would be killed." Rubenstein says he was so frightened by  
the heart attack that he wasn't in the mood to argue with anyone about  
anything. From that moment, the company lost its edge. Haney, an  
ex-Sperry-Univac guy, took over as CEO at Adler's request.

Soon, newcomers to the word processing scene cropped up. Volkswriter,  
WordPerfect, XyWrite, Word, NewWord, and a host of competitors began to  
battle for hegemony. Eventually, WordPerfect rose to the top, based on its  
superior support program.

Rubenstein's original vision for the company, which was renamed WordStar  
International, was to bring out a complete suite of integrated systems. In  
the early 1980s, the company released Calcstar and Datastar, and integrated  
them with WordStar in a system called Starburst. It was phenomenal for its  
era. In fact, it was the original "office" suite. Adler and company killed  
the idea.

Although WordStar was still the best word processor on the market until the  
mid-1980s, it still lacked some features, which annoyed users. As DOS was  
improved and Unix-like paths were added, WordStar could not accommodate  
paths. Worse, it had no undo key. The code base by now was turning into  
spaghetti code, and Barnaby wasn't around to fix things. In 1985, the company  
produced WordStar2000, a copy-protected program nothing like the older,  
lovable WordStar.

Though many pundits, including Esther Dyson, predicted great things for  
WordStar2000, users rejected it. The product was big, slow, and expensive and  
copy-protected.

WordStar might have been the most pirated software in the world, which in  
many ways accounted for its success. So when WordStar2000 arrived with a  
copy-protection scheme, everyone could have predicted its immediate demise.  
Books for WordStar sold like hot cakes, and the authors knew they were  
selling documentation for pirated copies of WordStar. The company itself  
should have sold the documentation alone to increase sales.

WordStar2000 symbolized the downturn and general muddy thinking that took  
over the company. The original WordStar code base was replaced by a WordStar  
clone called NewWord, which was just like WordStar, but incorporated undo and  
other features. Barnaby worked it well and kept the product alive long  
enough for WordStar International to sell everything to Softkey, where the  
decline continued until it was bought out by Corel.

WordStar basically invented the idea of "what you see is what you get"  
(WYSIWYG). It invented numerous features, including overlays, which later  
evolved into DLLs. It was the first product with dynamic pagination and even  
help levels, among other features. All modern word processors owe their  
existence to WordStar--perhaps one of the greatest single software efforts in  
the history of computing.

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