Jan 8, 2021
We’ve covered Xerox PARC a few times - and one aspect that’scome up has been the development of the Bravo word processor fromButler Lampson, Charles Simonyi, and team. Simonyi went on to workat Microsoft and spearheaded the development of Microsoft Word. ButBravo was the first WYSIWYG tool for creating documents, which wenow refer to as a word processor. That was 1974.
Something else we’ve covered happened in 1974, the release ofthe Altair 8800. One aspect of the Altair we didn’t cover is thatMichael Shrayer was a tinkerer who bought an Alatir and wrote aprogram that allowed him to write manuals. This became the ElectricPencil. It was text based though and not a WYSIWYG like Bravo was.It ran in 8k of memory and would be ported to Intel 8080, ZylogZ-80, and other processors over the years leading into the 80s. Butlet’s step back to the 70s for a bit. Because bellbottoms.
The Altair inspired a clone called the IMSAI 8080 in 1975. Thedirect of marketing, Seymour Rubenstein started tinkering with theidea of a word processor. He left IMSAI and by 1978, put together$8,500 and started a company called MicroPro International. Heconvinced Rob Barnaby, the head programmer at IMSAI, to joinhim.
They did market research into the tools being used by IBM andXerox. They made a list of what was needed and got to work. Theword processor grew. They released their word processor, which theycalled WordStar, for CP/M running on the Intel 8080. By then it was1979 and CP/M was a couple years old but already a pretty dominantoperating system for microcomputers. Software was a bit moreexpensive at the time and WordStar sold for $495.
At the time, you had to port your software to each OS running oneach hardware build. And the code was in assembly so not theeasiest thing in the world. This meant they wanted to keep thefeature set slim so WordStar could run on as many platforms aspossible. They ran on the Osborne 1 portable and with CP/M supportthey became the standard. They could wrap words automatically tothe next line.Imagine that.
They ported the software to other platforms. It was clear therewas a new OS that they needed to run on. So they brought in JimFox, who ported WordStar to run on DOS in 1981. They were on top ofthe world. Sure, there was Apple Write, Word, WordPerfect, andSamna, but WordStar was it.
Arthur C Clarke met Rubenstein and Barnaby and said they "mademe a born-again writer, having announced my retirement in 1978, Inow have six books in the works, all through WordStar." He wouldactually write dozens more works.
They released the third version in 1982 and quickly grew intothe most popular, dominant word processor on the market. The codebase was getting a little stale and so they brought in Peter Mierauto overhaul it for WordStar 4. The refactor didn’t come at the bestof times. In software, you’re the market leader until… You thoughtI was going to say Microsoft moved into town? Nope, although Wordwould eventually dominate word processing. But there was one morestep before computing got there.
Next, along with the release of the IBM PC, WordPerfect took themarket by storm. They had more features and while WordStar waspopular, it was the most pirated piece of software at the time.This meant less money to build features. Like using the MS-DOSkeyboard to provide more productivity tools. This isn’t to say theyweren’t making money. They’d grown to $72M in revenue by 1984. Whenthey filed for their initial public offering, or IPO, they had ahuge share of the word processing market and accounted for one outof every ten dollars spent on software.
WordStar 5 came in 1989 and as we moved into the 90s, it wasclear that WordStar 2000 had gone nowhere so WordStar 6 shipped in1990 and 7 in 1991. The buying tornado had slowed and whilerevenues were great, copy-protecting disks were slowing the spreadof the software.
Rubinstein is commonly credited with creating the first end-usersoftware licensing agreement, common with nearly every piece ofproprietary software today. Everyone was pirating back then so ifyou couldn’t use WordStar, move on to something you could steal.You know, like WordPerfect. MultiMate, AmiPro, Word, and so manyother tools. Sales were falling. New features weren’tshipping.
One pretty big one was support for Windows. By the time Windowssupport shipped, Microsoft had released Word, which had a solid twoyears to become the new de facto standard. SoftKey would acquirethe company in 1994, and go on to acquire a number of othercompanies until 2002 when they were acquired. But by then WordStarwas so far forgotten that no one was sure who actually owned theWordStar brand.
I can still remember using WordStar. And I remember doing workwhen I was a consultant for a couple of authors to help themrecover documents, which were pure ASCII files or computers thathad files in WordStar originally but moved to the WSD extensionlater. And I can remember actually restoring a BAK file whileworking at the computer labs at the University of Georgia, commonin the DOS days. It was a joy to use until I realized there wassomething better.
Rubinstein went on to buy another piece of software, aspreadsheet. He worked with another team, got a little help fromBarnaby and and Fox and eventually called it Surpass, which wasacquired by Borland, who would rename it to Quattro Pro. Thatspreadsheet borrowed the concept of multiple sheets in tabs fromBoeing Calc, now a standard metaphor. Amidst lawsuits with Lotus onwhether you could patent how software functions, or the UX ofsoftware, Borland sold Lotus to Novell during a time when Novellwas building a suite of products to compete with Microsoft.
We can thank WordStar for so much. Inspiring content creatorsand creative new features for word processing. But we also have toremember that early successes are always going to inspireadditional competition. Any company that grows large enough to filean initial public offering is going to face barbarian softwarevendors at their gates. When those vendors have no technical debt,they can out-deliver features. But as many a software company haslearned, expanding to additional products by becoming a portfoliocompany is one buffer for this. As is excellentexecution.
The market was WordStar’s to lose. And there’s a chance that itwas lost the second Microsoft pulled in Charles Simonyi, one of theoriginal visionaries behind Bravo from Xerox PARC. But when youhave 10% of all PC software sales it seems like maybe you gotoutmaneuvered in the market. But ultimately the industry was sosmall and so rapidly changing in the early 1980s that it was ripefor disruption on an almost annual basis. That is, until Microsoftslowly took the operating system and productivity suite markets and.doc, .xls, and .ppt files became the format all other programsneeded to support.
And we can thank Rubinstein and team for pioneering what we nowcall the software industry. He started on an IBM 1620 and ended hiscareer with WebSleuth, helping to usher in the search engine era.Many of the practices he put in place to promote WordStar are nowcommon in the industry. These days I talk to a dozen serialentrepreneurs a week. They could all wish to some day be asinfluential as he.
