“When?”
“Just started a week and a half ago.”
“Christ,” I said, “I sort of popped the question to him.”
“I’d just as soon you didn’t broadcast it,” Rubinstein said. “He’s not in solid yet, but I expect he will be. You can put in there a blurb that as of this writing Barnaby came back for a test run to see whether he could get involved again.”
“As a WordStar user,” I said, “I have a selfish interest in his developing it further. Will he be working on WordStar?”
“He’ll be working on WordStar,” said Rubinstein. Like a movie man, he excitedly described his coming attraction. (“It’ll just knock their socks off.”) The new WordStar would contain a spreadsheet. Also, used with the right printers, it would offer proportional spacing, meaning that an “I” would take up less room than a “W,” making the print look more booklike. What’s more, the new WordStar would be simpler to learn. Listening to Rubinstein raving over his forthcoming word processor, I could tell that if Barnaby didn’t work out on the new project, MicroPro might use someone else. Ideally, however, it wouldn’t. “Just incredible,” Rubinstein had said of Barnaby’s coding of WordStar. “The man is a consummate artist.”
Surely, I thought, Arthur Clarke would agree.
Barnaby stayed some months with MicroPro. In fact, he had helped fit WordStar into the little memory of the Epson lap-sized portable marketed that year. A micro magazine, meanwhile, came out with a report that a version of WordStar for big machines, Version 4.0, might contain split screens. In October 1984, however, I was still waiting. And Rob Barnaby had left MicroPro in July.
“Things didn’t click,” he said without going into the specifics. “We talked about a lot of things, but they didn’t jell.” He was now consulting.
MicroPro suffered in other ways. Yearly income was up 53 percent, and the company was still shipping thirty thousand copies of WordStar each month, but quarterly revenues reported in September 1984 were $12.4 million versus $15.6 million for the same period in 1983. The company sustained a loss in earnings of six cents a share, $756,000. Hoping to cope with threats such as NewWord, which sold for $250 and used the same commands as the older word processor, it laid off 10 percent of its workers and reduced WordStar’s list price from $495 to $350. NewWord even offered twists of its own. You could tell it to go to a certain page number, for instance, without having to specify a word on the page you were looking for. The natural question arose: Why should people pay $100 more for the real WordStar?