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[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?”