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]]

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 to do.”[do.”] He would “build packaged software” for businessmen and others unfamiliar with computer arcana[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]]

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.”