WordStar: The Creators
Arthur Clarke is the Arthur Clarke, the science-fiction writer who gave us 2001 and 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 of 2010; for they created WordStar, the word-processing program that Clarke uses.
WordStar is to micro software what Citizen Kane is 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 nearing the right margin—he just keeps on typing and a feature called word wrap automatically takes him on to the next line.
Granted, WordStar is traditional software. It doesn’t use icons, 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 offer split screens to 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.