“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.
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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[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.