WordStar is a word processor application for microcomputers. It dominated the market in the early and mid 1980s, succeeding the market leader Electric Pencil. It was published by MicroPro International, originally written for the CP/M80 operating system, and later written also for MS-DOS and other 16-bit PC OSes. Seymour I. Rubinstein was the principal owner of the company, and 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 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 quickly became dominated by the IBM PC, 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.
Seymour I. Rubinstein 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.[1] Priced at $495 and $40 for the manual,[2] by early 1980, MicroPro claimed in advertisements that 5,000 people had purchased WordStar in eight months.[3]
WordStar was the first microcomputer word processor to offer mail merge and textual WYSIWYG. 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 $500,000 in 1979 to $72 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.[1][4][5][6]
Distribution 5 1/4 inch diskettes and packaging for the last version (Version 4) of WordStar released for 8-bit CP/M.
A manual that PC Magazine described as "incredibly inadequate" 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,[7] using WRITE instead.[8]
WordStar 3 under CP/M
WordStar 7 under Windows XP
WordStar 3.0, the first version for MS-DOS, appeared in April 1982.[9][10] The DOS version was very similar to the original, and although the IBM PC had arrow keys and separate function keys, the traditional "WordStar diamond" and other Ctrl-key functions were retained,[5] leading to rapid adoption by former CP/M users.[citation needed] WordStar's ability to use a "non-document" mode to create text files without formatting made it popular among programmers for writing code.[11] Like the CP/M versions, the DOS WordStar was not explicitly designed for IBM PCs, but rather for any x86 machine (as there were a number of non-IBM-compatible PCs that used 8086 or 80186 CPUs). As such, it used only DOS's API calls and avoided any BIOS usage or direct hardware access. This carried with it an unfortunate performance penalty as everything had to be "double" processed (meaning that the DOS API functions would handle screen or keyboard I/O first and then pass them to the BIOS).
The first DOS version of WordStar, demoed 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,[9] 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.[12] 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",[13] but by 1983 it was the leading word processing system.[5][14] Although competition appeared early (the first version of WordPerfect debuted in 1982 and Microsoft Word in 1983), WordStar was the dominant word processor on x86 machines until 1985. It was part of the software bundle that accompanied Kaypro computers.