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[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.
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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.”