Who, anyway, wanted to hire a typist content to do the keyboard equivalent of twenty miles per hour?
And yet I tried to be tolerant. I hit the control key to fire up WordStar’s commands; Select users tapped “Escape.” “There are twenty-five thousand people happy with using ‘Escape’ instead of the control key,” Dean had told me, as patiently as a liberal Baptist explaining to a Klansman that Jews didn’t have horns.
Certainly it was true: one man’s joy, another man’s plastic-disked kludge—that was software for you. And what you learned first was often your first love. A computer magazine even called one article “Getting Married to WordStar.” “Can you erase your memory modules?” Mark Robinson, a marketing man with Lexisoft, asked before he mailed me a copy of his company’s Spellbinder word processor. He had a point. I liked Spellbinder more than Select, much more, because it ran faster on the Kaypro, but I still could not abide by the need to enter a new mode to make insertions or corrections. It seemed inhibiting, this requirement, though perhaps more in writing than in secretarial work. Michael Canyes, a computer consultant, at the time loved Palantir. It offered many of the better features of both WordStar and Spellbinder and let a nonprogrammer set up the numbers pads of many computers to serve as function keys. Canyes also appreciated The Final Word, an excellent word processor for footnoting and other academic requirements. It was clear. There were serious alternatives to WordStar—some, anyway—even if, like the writer of the “Married” article, I was already well matched.
In some ways, however, I felt uncomfortable about the general direction in which the software business seemed to be moving. Would less powerful but well-marketed products like Select drive out the future WordStars?
The WordStar had benefited from Seymour Rubinstein’s salesmanship. But Rubinstein also had boasted a solid computer background; and unlike some of the new people in software, he wasn’t just a businessman cashing in on an exploding market.
Again and again a pattern was beginning to repeat itself. Programmer-entrepreneurs would tough it out in the proverbial garages—for some reason programmers work in garages, authors in garrets—and score with the right software hit. Propelled by little more than their drive and technical expertise, their companies would grow. Then, however, other businessmen, real businessmen, would want the same niche, and the marketing people would muscle in and set the tone. Or, as with some new companies, they might have been setting the tone from the very start.
This had been the classic pattern in many industries—Orville and Wilbur Wright hadn’t exactly gone on to become major aviation magnates—but computers were improving faster than had airplanes. And so the process was accelerated; well-financed managers were rapidly replacing garage-style entrepreneurs.
The stakes were higher, and striking back, software authors were even hiring agents. The question arose, however, of the extent to which the market would remain open to more imaginative garage people, anyway, what with increased use of teams to develop complex programs.
“The frontier,” said Jeffrey Tarter, publisher of Soft.letter, an industry publication, “is already closing.
“A couple of years ago you got to be successful primarily by competently executing an innovative idea and by picking the right machine to produce that execution for. VisiCalc for the Apple is the classic example here, but lots of other programs achieved success on a smaller scale by doing something useful for a microcomputer that came to dominate a market niche”—or, I would add with WordStar in mind, by producing a program valuable for its very ability to run on a number of machines.