We were talking now in summer 1983. Barnaby had removed himself from the payroll of Chang Laboratories, and I suspected it might be because he worried about living up to his first success. Barnaby didn’t discourage that impression. When asked if another WordStar might be on its way, he said, “I hit once; I may not hit again.” I understood. He was no different from a writer trying to create another blockbuster book or movie; he would be competing against himself—a contest made more difficult by the fact that MicroPro’s marketing expertise would no longer be on his side. I suggested that he and Rubinstein might both benefit by working together again as a team. If Barnaby agreed, though, he certainly didn’t make that clear to me, and I hung up thinking that the Barnaby-Rubinstein collaboration was as dead as the Welles-Mankiewicz one.
“Let’s just put it this way,” said Barnaby of MicroPro. “They could have made me happier there and I’d still be there, and MicroPro would still be growing instead of being flat.”
“Rob is beloved around here,” said a public relations woman at MicroPro when I suggested that the company might benefit from his return, “but we have many other good programmers.”
Not long afterward I was talking to Seymour Rubinstein. He was decidedly more upbeat about MicroPro’s fortune than Barnaby had been. He had added some fifty people to his staff since we’d last talked. Rubinstein predicted record sales of about $42 million in 1983, of which WordStar would be 65 percent; he expected that his word processor would thrive inside the ROMs of $1,500 lap-sized computers.
During our conversation I expressed my astonishment over a newspaper article; supposedly, a programmer—unnamed—had dreamed up WordStar in a week or so during vacation.
“I was amazed to see it myself,” Rubinstein said. “It was really romanticizing something in a way that wasn’t necessary, beyond not being true.”
“I talked to Barnaby,” I said, “and he has the normal worries of programmers and writer-writers—whether he can ever repeat his success. And I still wonder about the chances of you two coming together again.”
“Well,” Rubinstein said without the slightest pause, “I got him back working again.”
“Now?”
“Yep.”