8. A =search and replace= substitutes one word (or group of words) for

another. ■ ■ ■ WordStar’s creators, Seymour Rubinstein and Rob Barnaby, are like Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz of _Citizen Kane_. The movie would have been hack melodrama without the brilliance of both the producer-director and his writer; and yet critics still argue over _Kane_’s exact origins. So it is with WordStar. When _Time_ said Rubinstein had written the program, a friend of Barnaby’s whipped off an angry letter to the editor. I won’t take sides here. Rubinstein, however, far from playing down Barnaby’s WordStar role to me, unhesitatingly passed on his phone number when I asked. Barnaby is equally willing to acknowledge the importance of his collaborator. Even the letter writer emphasizes the usefulness of Rubinstein’s salesmanship and his perception of the software market back in the late 1970s when WordStar was born. A short, stocky, bespectacled man in his fifties, Rubinstein grew up in New York City, the son of a pinball- and novelty-machine owner who died while Seymour was still in grade school. His mother worked as a clerk. “My first job,” Rubinstein said, “was a helper on a fruit truck when I was twelve years old.” Two years later, however, his neighbors were “letting me ruin their radios,” and by his mid-twenties, he seemed settled into the routine of a TV repairman. But Rubinstein grew restless after six months’ reserve military duty in the 1950s; he attended night school at Brooklyn College and took up technical writing. Decades later he recalled a navigational computer he encountered while a civilian, speaking as if it were his “Rosebud,” as if he were Charles Kane thinking about the Colorado snows and the name on his childhood sled. He gave me the machine’s exact measurements, eight by nine by twelve inches. Then, mixing nostalgia with awe, he said, “If you opened it up, it would look like a Swiss watchmaker’s nightmare, all those gears and little electronic things whirring and clicking away. But with it you could take off from an aircraft carrier and circle overhead and press the reset button and fly anywhere you wanted, and wherever you flew, an indicator kept track of how far you were from that spot on the ocean and told how you could return.” Ask Rubinstein about his early career and you may hear more talk of machines than of people. “$2” The hardware, however, helped make the man. Rubinstein spent years working with data-communications networks—the ones that, for instance, handle airline reservations or credit-card information. Without quick, accurate updating, these =real-time= systems are worthless: just ask anyone whom an airline has booked on an already-full flight. You could have the best-designed computers in the cosmos. But the question in the end may be “Did the airline clerk key in reservations for you on the right flight at the right time?” And Rubinstein’s software philosophy later reflected his real-time work. He originally did not intend WordStar for the bumbling and the lazy but for “the production typist” on whom the boss heavily counted for both speed and accuracy. In my last interview with Rubinstein for this book, he downplayed his statement that he created WordStar for the fleet-fingered typist. “I believe that everyone deserves a product appropriate to his particular classification,” he said, “and while WordStar may have been aimed at a particular niche, that is not to say we shouldn’t enlarge the scope of this product.... We’re going to make the next version easier to learn.” As thousands of professionals and executives can verify, however, WordStar all along has been quite learnable. Early in his computer career Rubinstein also grasped the importance of clear documentation to guide people through the programs. IBM at the time was one of the world’s largest publishers, at least in sheer volume of paper consumed, ranking right up near Random House and other giants, and Rubinstein recalls the old manuals as abysmal: “You really had to have a lot of drive and patience to get through their stuff.” Programmers rose or fell according to their ability to push through “arbitrary collections of material arranged in an arbitrary order.” Rubinstein, who by now had forsaken technical writing for programming, made a discovery helpful to any software user: you won’t serve yourself best, necessarily, by completely memorizing the manuals. The trick, rather, is to know where to turn in a hurry when you _do_ have a problem. In 1977, wandering through a store for computer hobbyists in San Rafael, California, Rubinstein saw a box with blue-and-red switches and lights, and “it looked really interesting. I went home, built it, and a week later I had a computer.”[17] Footnote 17: _InfoWorld_, April 5, 1982. It was his first micro, perhaps more of his Rosebud, after all, than the navigational computer. “I had spent many hours of my life in very brightly lit, cold rooms in the middle of the night, surrounded by millions of dollars’ worth of junk,” he once recalled. And yet his new dwarf seemed “a true computer” to him “in every sense of the word. I could see the potential, and I got very excited.”[18] His elation grew when he saw that a company named IMSAI, run by an old boss, had produced the kit. He once remembered the firm, now defunct, as “one of the tiny companies that really made this industry happen. The industry did not happen by some big, famous manufacturer deciding this was what he was going to do. It was a grass-roots movement.”[19] Footnote 18: _InfoWorld_, April 5, 1982. Footnote 19: H. Edward Roberts, president of MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), a New Mexico company later overwhelmed by the competition, came as close as anyone to being the father of the first successful personal computer. His Altair 8080 made the cover of _Popular Electronics_ in January 1975. Rubinstein joined IMSAI as software-products manager and within two months was marketing director; there he signed the first contract between a computer manufacturer and Digital Research for CP/M, the popular operating system—the only one with which WordStar at first would work. Leaving IMSAI in 1978, Rubinstein “knew exactly what I wanted to do.” He would “build packaged software” for businessmen and others unfamiliar with computer arcana. Registering out a business name in June, he included “International” after “MicroPro” because “I felt that with the right, well-designed products, Europe would be an approachable market.”[20] Footnote 20: The November 1982 _PC Magazine_ is the source of the quotes on Rubinstein’s business plans after IMSAI. Rubinstein was barely out of the IMSAI fold when he dropped by Rob Barnaby’s flat in Berkeley, California. The two had met at IMSAI, which Barnaby had left a short time earlier, for different reasons, after hot words between the moody young programmer and his boss. Barnaby was a Harvard graduate, a physics major, a tennis pro’s son, the descendant of an old New England family. A pattern in his life was seemingly emerging by the time he reached his thirties; he would throw himself into computer jobs, program masterfully for a while, then find his interest waning. Just before joining IMSAI, Barnaby had been fixing up old houses. “I kind of like creating things with computers and forgetting them and getting away from them when I’m not creating something new,” Barnaby told me. He was in no hurry, quite likely, to return to work after IMSAI, having salted away a good part of his salary. “I like the flexibility that saving money produces.” He isn’t materialistic—the very antithesis of it. And yet money and WordStar are together a touchy subject. Barnaby’s work for MicroPro seemingly did not make him rich, at least not California rich. “It was originally royalties,” Barnaby said, “and when the royalties played out, I took a salary and a stock option.” His total earnings from MicroPro were somewhere in the six figures. “I want you to understand where his ego is,” said the friend who wrote _Time_. “He’s often chided by people for allowing himself to be taken advantage of and he simply does not want to discuss it. He says, ‘I made a deal. I kept my promise, Seymour kept his promise and that’s it.’” Describing the circumstances in a peculiarly Californian way, the friend said: “If Seymour was really greedy he would have gone to Rob two years ago and said something like, ‘Hey, you got to believe me, Rob, I never expected this thing would ever do what it’s done. And I’d like to do right by you and so I would like you to graciously accept this check for $150,000 I brought with me here today.’ Then Seymour would have owned him. Rob did not get rich writing WordStar. People think that, but it’s simply not true. I’ve seen it. The guy’s a friend of mine. He’s back to work again because of financial need.” “We were both very poor,” Rubinstein told me earlier about himself and Barnaby. “I had less than $8,500 to my name, in fact, but I gave Rob a $2,500 retainer, a third of my cash reserves. I owned a house, but the bank owned most of it.” Rubinstein offered to make Barnaby a partner. Barnaby, characteristically wary of entanglements, turned him down. An early program Barnaby did for Rubinstein was a programmer’s aid, which, among other things, let you move words and numbers around more easily on the screen. It was no more a word processor than a pencil. Nor did Barnaby intend it to be one: “I was writing a program editor, a tool for me.” Yet “computer stores would be trying to sell people something they could write letters with, and it would get back to Seymour that our program definitely did not have those features.” Rubinstein recalls taking a big hint from dealers’ enthusiasm for a program called Electric Pencil. “What they liked,” he said, “was you could both enter and print from the same program, and you had a lot of control over the printout. You could specify things like underlining and margin settings, but it was very primitive. You certainly couldn’t imagine what it would be like until you printed it. You didn’t know where page breaks would occur, where one page would end and another began,” and so you might have to print several times before you got it right, since each change might create new breaks in the wrong places. That was micro word processing 1970s style. You either put up with all these nasty details or prayed for a sweepstakes killing so you could buy a $20,000 “dedicated” machine from IBM or Wang. ■ ■ ■ When You Should Buy a Dedicated Word Processor Here are some times when you should seriously consider it: