I asked Russell about the cumbersome series of keystrokes that the Kaypro version of Select inflicted on people making insertions a few sentences back in their writing.
He knew about the problem. And he knew about WordStar, too.
“I’m a lot more aware of that since the ad ran,” he said of WordStar’s reputation as a powerful word-processing system, “but I don’t think I’m in a position to say much about it since I gave Select my endorsement. But you’ve brought up some valid points. The whole business of personal computers is new to me in the last six months, and so I’m learning about it, as well.” Russell said he used Select several hours a week, that he could legitimately endorse it even if he wasn’t actually using it mainly as a gentleman farmer. He was right. I didn’t question his basic sincerity. But for me, anyway, Select had proved tediously cumbersome.
In early 1983 I called up Martin Dean, the head of Select Information Systems, and did the proper thing.
“Martin,” I said in effect, “I hate your software.”
Why gladhand information out of him, then stab him in the back?
Dean was smart and a good sport. Not only didn’t he hang up on me; he spent an hour on the phone giving his point of view. Like the developer of WordStar, Dean had a philosophy, one born of his own business experiences—in this case, a WordStar debacle. He was a real estate lawyer eager for one of his staffers to work with a sophisticated word processor. “I handed her WordStar,” he told me, “and said, ‘It’s the standard in the industry.’ And she came back two days later and said she was not going to do that.”
“She was vehement,” Dean said. She wasn’t going to spend the seventy hours she felt it would take to master WordStar.
And she wasn’t “just” a secretary. She had a year of law school, had done ten years of legal secretarial work, and was supervising Dean’s legal research staff. “She’s one of the brightest women I’ve worked with in the legal business,” he said. “But she didn’t have the time to learn WordStar.” A major manufacturer had done a study comparing the two word processors’ learning time. “And my understanding,” said Dean, “is they determined it takes about fifty hours of working with WordStar to become as accomplished as you could become in ninety minutes of using Select.” I disagreed. WordStar took much less time for me to learn; Select, much more. With other people, it might be the reverse, but a good company normally wouldn’t have so much turnover that the employees would lack time to master a decent word processor.
Defending Select, Dean praised the tutorial disk and the program’s built-in memory aids. Want to erase? If you hit the “Escape” control and pressed the “E,” you’d eventually do that. Eventually. Dean and I went through a keystroke count. He claimed that actually his system—improved since the one I’d tried—was as fast or faster than rivals if run on the right machines. He said the Kaypro just wasn’t right for his program.