WordStar


WordStar is a discontinued word processor application for microcomputers. It was published by MicroPro International and originally written for the CP/M-80 operating system, with later editions added for MS-DOS and other 16-bit PC OSes. Rob Barnaby was the sole author of the early versions of the program.
Starting with WordStar 4.0, the program was built on new code written principally by Peter Mierau. WordStar dominated the market in the early and mid-1980s, succeeding the market leader Electric Pencil.
WordStar was written with as few assumptions as possible about the operating system and machine hardware, allowing it to be easily ported across the many platforms that proliferated in the early 1980s. Because all of these versions had relatively similar commands and controls, users could move between platforms with equal ease. It was already popular when its inclusion with the Osborne 1 portable computer made the program the de facto standard for much of the small computer word-processing market.
As the market became dominated by the IBM PC and later Microsoft Windows, this same portable design made it difficult for the program to add new features, and affected its performance. In spite of its great popularity in the early 1980s, these problems allowed WordPerfect to take WordStar's place as the most widely used word processor from 1985 on.

History

Founding

was an employee of early microcomputer company IMSAI, where he negotiated software contracts with Digital Research and Microsoft. After leaving IMSAI, Rubinstein planned to start his own software company that would sell through the new network of retail computer stores. He founded MicroPro International Corporation in September 1978 and hired John Robbins Barnaby as programmer, who wrote a word processor, WordMaster, and a sorting program, SuperSort, in Intel 8080 assembly language. After Rubinstein obtained a report that discussed the abilities of contemporary standalone word processors from IBM, Xerox, and Wang Laboratories, Barnaby enhanced WordMaster with similar features and support for the CP/M operating system. MicroPro began selling the product, now renamed WordStar, in June 1979. Priced at and for the manual, by early 1980, MicroPro said in advertisements that 5,000 people had purchased WordStar in eight months.

Early success

WordStar was the first microcomputer word processor to offer mail merge and textual WYSIWYG. Besides word-wrapping, this last was most noticeably implemented as on-screen pagination during the editing session. Using the number of lines-per-page given by the user during program installation, WordStar would display a full line of dash characters onscreen showing where page breaks would occur during hardcopy printout. Many users found this very reassuring during editing, knowing beforehand where pages would end and begin, and where text would thus be interrupted across pages.
Barnaby left the company in March 1980, but due to WordStar's sophistication, the company's extensive sales and marketing efforts, and bundling deals with Osborne and other computer makers, MicroPro's sales grew from in 1979 to million in fiscal year 1984, surpassing earlier market leader Electric Pencil. By May 1983 BYTE magazine called WordStar "without a doubt the best-known and probably the most widely used personal computer word-processing program". The company released WordStar 3.3 in June 1983; the 650,000 cumulative copies of WordStar for the IBM PC and other computers sold by that fall was more than double that of the second most-popular word processor, and that year MicroPro had 10% of the personal computer software market. By 1984, the year it held an initial public offering, MicroPro was the world's largest software company with 23% of the word processor market.
A manual that PC Magazine described as "incredibly inadequate" and "a looseleaf nightmare" led many authors to publish replacements. One of them, Introduction to WordStar, was written by future Goldstein & Blair founder and Whole Earth Software Catalog contributor Arthur Naiman, who hated the program and had a term inserted into his publishing contract that he not be required to use WordStar to write the book, using WRITE instead.

MS-DOS

WordStar 3.0, the first version for MS-DOS, appeared in April 1982. Until then, many PC owners bought Z-80 cards so they could run the CP/M version. The first DOS version is very similar to the CP/M original, and although the IBM PC has arrow keys and separate function keys, the traditional "WordStar diamond" and other Ctrl-key functions were retained, leading to rapid adoption by former CP/M users. WordStar's ability to use a "non-document" mode to create text files without formatting made it popular among programmers as a source-code editor. Like the CP/M versions, the DOS WordStar was not explicitly designed for IBM PCs, but rather for any x86 machine. As such, it uses only DOS's API calls and avoids any BIOS usage or direct hardware access. This carried with it a performance penalty as everything had to be "double" processed.
The first DOS version of WordStar, demonstrated by Jim Fox and executed by a team of Irish programmers in April 1982, was a port of the CP/M-86 version of WordStar, which in turn had been ported from the CP/M-80 version in September 1981. This had been started by Diane Hajicek and was completed by an Irish team of programmers under ISIS-II, probably using Intel's source-to-source translator CONV86. Thus the main program executable was a.COM file which could only access 64 kB of memory. Users quickly learned they could make WordStar run dramatically faster by installing a RAM disk board, and copying the WordStar program files into it. WordStar would still access the "disk" repeatedly, but the far faster access of the RAM drive compared to a floppy disk yielded a substantial speed improvement. However, edited versions of a document were "saved" only to this RAM disk, and had to be copied to physical media before rebooting.
InfoWorld described WordStar as "notorious for its complexity", and Stephen Manes of PC wrote that its "function keys seemed to have been assigned late one drunken Saturday night", but by 1983 WordStar was the leading word processing system. Although competition appeared early, WordStar was the dominant word processor on x86 machines until 1985. It was part of the software bundle that accompanied Kaypro computers.
At that time, the evolution from CP/M to MS-DOS, with an "Alt" key, had taken place. WordStar had until then never successfully exploited the MS-DOS keyboard, and that is one explanation for its demise.
By that point, MicroPro had dropped the generic MS-DOS support and WordStar 4.0 was exclusively for IBM compatibles, which differed from MS-DOS-compatible programs in terms of screen addressing. It was the first version of WordStar supporting directories—a feature nearly mandatory to be usable on machines with hard disks. Also introduced were simple macros and the install program was completely updated to include features like reprogramming function keys and an extensive printer support. During the second half of the 1980s, the fully modernized WordPerfect overtook it in sales.
WordStar 5 added footnote and endnote capability and a fairly advanced Page preview function. Versions 5.5 and 6 had added features, and version 7 included a complete macro language as well as support for over 500 printers. It also featured style sheets and mouse support.

Problems with piracy

WordStar was not copy-protected up to and including version 3.3. Columnist John Dvorak recalled: "WordStar may have been the most pirated software in the world, which in many ways accounted for its success. Books for WordStar sold like hot cakes and the authors knew they were selling documentation for pirated copies of WordStar. The company itself should have just sold the documentation alone to increase sales. This was the wink-wink-nudge-nudge aspect of the industry at the time and everyone knew it. So when WordStar 2000 arrived with a copy protection scheme, everyone should have predicted its immediate demise".
Besides the ready availability of third-party books explaining WordStar in detail, the program's extensive and configurable onscreen help facility made it easy to use an illegal copy.

WordStar 2000

At the time, the IBM Displaywriter System dominated the dedicated word processor market. IBM's main competition was Wang Laboratories. Such machines were expensive and were generally accessed through terminals connected to central mainframe or midrange computers.
When IBM announced it was bringing DisplayWrite to the PC, MicroPro focused on creating a clone of it which they marketed, in 1984, as WordStar 2000. WordStar 2000 supported features such as disk directories, but lacked compatibility with the file formats of existing WordStar versions and also made numerous unpopular changes to the interface. Gradually competitors such as WordPerfect reduced MicroPro's market share. MultiMate, in particular, used the same key sequences as Wang word processors, which made it popular with secretaries switching from those to PCs.
BYTE stated that WordStar 2000 had "all the charm of an elephant on motorized skates", warning in 1986 that an IBM PC AT with hard drive was highly advisable to run the software, which it described as "clumsy, overdesigned, and uninviting... I can't come up with a reason why I'd want to use it". WordStar 2000 had a user interface that was substantially different from the original WordStar, and the company did little to advertise this. However, its lasting legacy on the word processing industry was the introduction of three keyboard shortcuts that are still widely used, namely, Ctrl+B for boldfacing, Ctrl+I for italicizing, and Ctrl+U for underlining text.