“Yes,” said Rubinstein.
“The star?”
“Yes.”
“Then why not call it WordStar?”
And so it was.
Hitting the marketplace in the summer of 1979, the product clicked; no competitor came close; at least none offered WordStar’s get-what-you-see printing features.
Rubinstein had come out with good, timely software, and now he was riding the beginnings of the micro wave. Just as with VisiCalc, buyers soon asked about WordStar by name—before they bought their computers. In fact, often it was why they bought micros. And Rubinstein found WordStar wasn’t merely a good first sale for dealers. Frequently, it would be a second. Balking at WordStar’s price, customers would make do with an inferior word processor but remember the sales reps’ original praise of the MicroPro program.
Ironically, as WordStar was taking off, Barnaby, its writer, was headed toward another burnout. The atmosphere around MicroPro was changing. Rubinstein, who eventually would name a yacht the MicroStar and move into a hilltop home with a sunken tile tub, was losing touch with some programmers. “They locked us up in this little windowless room with Customer Support,” recalled Jim Fox, Barnaby’s former assistant, who worked on WordStar Version 3.0, the one I’m using. “It was messy. It was very noisy—not very good air circulation. And then they were expecting us to do programming. Rob asked months and months for shelves, and they never gave them until he threw a temper tantrum.” It seemed strange for Rubinstein to let this happen. Everyone agrees that $400,000 home or not, he was the opposite of a golf-course president. And yet Rubinstein had burdened MicroPro with high-tech bureaucrats who were turning it into a mini-Washington, inflicting reorganization after reorganization. The real producers, whether sales reps or programmers, sometimes suffered. Barnaby quit in the summer of 1980 just after working on an important sister program of WordStar, MailMerge, which helps businesses personalize letters with names plugged in from mail lists. “To my knowledge,” Rubinstein told me in early 1983, “he has not coded anything of significance since.”
Rubinstein was telling the truth as he knew it. Barnaby, indeed, had largely forgotten about computers. He had lost excess weight; he had traveled; he had stopped smoking and shaved off his beard. In superficial ways he seemed a different man from the writer of WordStar. And yet Barnaby had left software before and returned; and in late 1982, unknown to Rubinstein apparently, he had again.
It wasn’t just that he needed the money. He could no longer flee computerdom so easily. A barrier had tumbled, the one between his work and the rest of the world. Once micros had been mostly hobbyists’ toys, demanding hours of soldering and programming. Many of his friends hadn’t fathomed what he did. But now Barnaby was hearing a woman—formerly perplexed—say that WordStar was the rage at the stores where she was shopping for her new business computer. Barnaby’s father got 2010 for Christmas and read that Arthur Clarke had written it with WordStar; Clarke had sent the book to New York on a five-inch floppy and transmitted final corrections from Sri Lanka through his computer over a satellite link. Another science-fiction leader, I discovered, also was hoping to catch up with 2010—Seymour Rubinstein.