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, these =real-time= systems 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 you _do_ have 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]
Footnote 17:
_InfoWorld_, April 5, 1982.
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]
Footnote 18:
_InfoWorld_, April 5, 1982.
Footnote 19:
H. Edward Roberts, president of MITS (Micro Instrumentation and
Telemetry Systems), a New Mexico company later overwhelmed by the
competition, came as close as anyone to being the father of the first
successful personal computer. His Altair 8080 made the cover of
_Popular Electronics_ in January 1975.
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 to do.” He
would “build packaged software” for businessmen and others unfamiliar
with computer arcana. 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]
Footnote 20:
The November 1982 _PC Magazine_ is the source of the quotes on
Rubinstein’s business plans after IMSAI.
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 wrote
_Time_. “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 you got 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.
■ ■ ■
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 may bawl you out for not buying a Xerox _micro_.
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, more programmers 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.
■ ■ ■
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 programming aid to write WordStar. Then he 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, must _see_. 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 was _why_ they 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 MicroPro was changing.
Rubinstein, who eventually would name a yacht the _MicroStar_ and 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 got _2010_ for
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 with _2010_—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 perhaps also 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 a 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 largely _because_ Rubinstein 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 that MicroPro’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.