I would like to correct various factual errors in this recounting of the history. First of all, the genius Rob Barnaby had written WordStar entirely in Z80 assembler which was then cross assembled into 6502 Assembler for the early Apple computers.
He was a magician in terms of fitting a very complicated program into tiny RAM. In this case he was trying to fit over 100k lines of code into 64Kbytes of RAM. He seriously abused the overlay manager which would let you swap in various sections of code as needed.
Micropro was moving to a team approach and the solo programmer of Barnaby created conflicts, which culminated in him throwing his terminal out the window of the building.
At this time period, the applications had to carry their own printer drivers, and WordStar had to know the command codes for hundreds of printers. It was a full time position just to test all the printers being made.
Micropro wanted to upgrade their already good and hot selling product into something that would be more user friendly The original Wordstar, if you put in an extra BOLD tag, would flip polarity on all subsequent text, and do some crazy stuff that beginning users didn't find enjoyable. They hired a designer, Dan Druid, who was trained in the US Navy in Human Factors research, and very scientifically designed WordStar 2000.
I had a friend Karen Brown who worked at Micropro and i learned about their massive success, so as an education to myself i cloned WordStar in C on an IBM 370 located in SF at Reed Risk Insurance, an R&D firm that only had a few people on staff, but happened to have a monster 370 machine that was entirely unused at night.
After six months i had cloned the basics of WordStar, and got an introduction to Micropro staff, and because of the potential 1 million dollar offer from AT&T for a Unix version of WordStar, they hired me as lead programmer, and for the next year i worked with 12 programmers at Micropro to develop Wordstar 2000.
WordStar 2000 was a very well received product, and i hit my royalty cap in 2 months....
For those youngsters out there who don't know what a constraint like Kilobytes means, the 1024 x1024 icon for each Iphone app (required to go into the iTunes App Store) takes up more room than the entire WordStar program, which had a spelling corrector and mailmerge features. It is mind-boggling how compact that program was. I think "Hello World" takes about 250 Mbytes to run via the Java JVM.
The real reason for the demise of the firm is that the management at Micropro refused the proposal to continue evolution of the product into bitmap graphics, as the future was already knocking on the door with the Xerox Star and then the Apple Lisa.
But the real body blow was the loss of Dan Druid, who died of AIDS before it was even recognized as a disease. They foolishly assigned a marketing person as head of R&D and there was no R&D after that.
A new company was formed by key members of the development team, and a new effort to build a bitmap desktop publishing program was started (Beyond Words).
In the end, the Apple LaserWriter with PostScript revolutionized the desktop publishing industry, and WordPerfect was eventually destroyed by Microsoft Word, which remains to this day the top word processor. PostScript was invented at Xerox PARC by Geschke and Warnock, but Xerox refused to commercialize it so they left... Xerox takes the prize for bungling more technology inventions than any other company in history
There have been a few advanced products like Ventura Publisher, Quark Xpress, PageMaker, FrameMaker, and Adobe InDesign which addressed the higher end market, and now MS Word is being challenged by the free Google docs, so in a way the entire market has been frozen, and as there is no more revenue to be had in this area, we will probably not see many new products
I'd love to have a chat with you one day. I used to sell and use wordstar, Wordcraft (Commodore), WordPerfect, Spellbinder, Electric Pencil, Lotus Manuscript, IBM displaywrite (3-4-5?), Bristol Software Factory's Silicon office etc etc etc
After helping building WordStar 2000, i created a startup with ex-microsoft staffers called Beyond Words, and we made a product for Canon, just missed out on a deal with a big company, then under contract built DisplayWrite 5 Composer for IBM. You can reach me on Twitter as CodingFiend
The 6502 CPU is the one that was used inside the early Apple computers. You added an 80 column card, and for a big discount and no service contract you had something that would replace the popular Wang word processing machine. The spreadsheet and word processor drove the computer revolution.
The only version of WordStar available for the Apple II required the Microsoft Z/80 SoftCard. There was never any version that ran on the Apple II's native 6502 CPU. I had an Apple II (in fact I still have it) along with the Z/80 SoftCard and Videx 80 column card necessary for running WordStar. WordStar along with dBase were somewhat famous for being the primary reason the SoftCard was so popular.
When I saw your comment, I thought maybe there was a 6502 release I'd never heard of, but if it existed, there is zero evidence of it anywhere on the Internet. Every contemporaneous article and advertisement I can find anywhere that talks about WordStar makes no mention of a 6502 version.
I would like to correct some more errors. There was NO WordStar for the EPSON HX-20,(two Hitachi 6301 CPUs at 614 kHz - Cannot run CP/M) but there was for the EPSON PX-8 (z80 cpu) which used a ROM for program storage, 128kb RAM disk and microcassette based mass storage system.
CP/M was possible on the z80 softcard for the Apple ][
The other factor missing was software piracy. There was no way to protect CP/M software and piracy was, to say the least, rampant.
I worked for UK computer store from 1979-1992 and we had real problem with customers who purchased one copy of ever program and then duplicated it. CP/M came with machines but dBASE][, wordstar, caxton's Cardbox, SuperCalc, Perfect Office (Which was garbage) were regularly copied. People would pirate the software and buy the book from their local bookstore.
There was a UK group, 'FAST', Federation against software theft' and they raid organisations, large and small, and made their findings and fines, public.
Thank you! I chose to remove that bit entirely. I had gotten that info from a more recent publication, but after your prompting I search for Epson literature of the time period. You are absolutely correct. I appreciate it!
Well, there was also the Epson PX4 as well, and, like the PX8, was sold in different countries under different names. All these machines ran CP/M and could run a huge library of CP/M software.
It would be useful to be able to do a pinch-zoom on mobile, the images ate unreadable without that ability. The zoom button doesn't make any difference on my Android phone.
I may be mis-remembering. After it was almost 50 years ago. MicroPro did make a custom version for some Japanese early laptops, the Epson Maple for example
So they were using cross-assemblers and overlays to fit in the tiny RAM spaces of the original PC's.
I was not involved in Wordstar, only WordStar 2000 which was written in C by a team of 12 programmers over a year period. Micropro had been offered a million to port WordStar to UNIX, but that offer was turned down, as Micropro made way more money on DOS with WordStar 2000, which in the IBM PC era, which along with VisiCalc and the databases that popped up were giving small businesses a huge boost. Suddenly big companies had worse automation than little ones.
It was a golden era for small business in America, where the advantages of big credit lines to lease mainframes worked against you.
The author of the "Game of Thrones" books Mr. Martin, i believe uses Wordstar or Wordstar 2000 to write all of his books. Wordstar had great ergonomics; if you were a touch typist you could control the cursor very quickly with control key shortcuts to move left and write a space or a word or to the line boundary. Using a mouse slows people way down if you are a fast typist, lifting your hands off the home row costs many milliseconds.
They did port Wordstar to the 8080 so maybe the other cross assembler. We should ask Jim Fox or Rob Barnaby.
I've been using WordStar for 40 years (as of next month), and continue to write all my books with it (I'm a Hugo Award-winning science-fiction writer); I explain why I love it so much here:
I use WordStar 7.0D, the final MS-DOS version, under the DOSBox-X emulator (not plain DOSBox, but rather DOSBox-X, which has exellent specific WordStar support: https://dosbox-x.com/
I would like to correct various factual errors in this recounting of the history. First of all, the genius Rob Barnaby had written WordStar entirely in Z80 assembler which was then cross assembled into 6502 Assembler for the early Apple computers.
He was a magician in terms of fitting a very complicated program into tiny RAM. In this case he was trying to fit over 100k lines of code into 64Kbytes of RAM. He seriously abused the overlay manager which would let you swap in various sections of code as needed.
Micropro was moving to a team approach and the solo programmer of Barnaby created conflicts, which culminated in him throwing his terminal out the window of the building.
At this time period, the applications had to carry their own printer drivers, and WordStar had to know the command codes for hundreds of printers. It was a full time position just to test all the printers being made.
Micropro wanted to upgrade their already good and hot selling product into something that would be more user friendly The original Wordstar, if you put in an extra BOLD tag, would flip polarity on all subsequent text, and do some crazy stuff that beginning users didn't find enjoyable. They hired a designer, Dan Druid, who was trained in the US Navy in Human Factors research, and very scientifically designed WordStar 2000.
I had a friend Karen Brown who worked at Micropro and i learned about their massive success, so as an education to myself i cloned WordStar in C on an IBM 370 located in SF at Reed Risk Insurance, an R&D firm that only had a few people on staff, but happened to have a monster 370 machine that was entirely unused at night.
After six months i had cloned the basics of WordStar, and got an introduction to Micropro staff, and because of the potential 1 million dollar offer from AT&T for a Unix version of WordStar, they hired me as lead programmer, and for the next year i worked with 12 programmers at Micropro to develop Wordstar 2000.
WordStar 2000 was a very well received product, and i hit my royalty cap in 2 months....
For those youngsters out there who don't know what a constraint like Kilobytes means, the 1024 x1024 icon for each Iphone app (required to go into the iTunes App Store) takes up more room than the entire WordStar program, which had a spelling corrector and mailmerge features. It is mind-boggling how compact that program was. I think "Hello World" takes about 250 Mbytes to run via the Java JVM.
The real reason for the demise of the firm is that the management at Micropro refused the proposal to continue evolution of the product into bitmap graphics, as the future was already knocking on the door with the Xerox Star and then the Apple Lisa.
But the real body blow was the loss of Dan Druid, who died of AIDS before it was even recognized as a disease. They foolishly assigned a marketing person as head of R&D and there was no R&D after that.
A new company was formed by key members of the development team, and a new effort to build a bitmap desktop publishing program was started (Beyond Words).
In the end, the Apple LaserWriter with PostScript revolutionized the desktop publishing industry, and WordPerfect was eventually destroyed by Microsoft Word, which remains to this day the top word processor. PostScript was invented at Xerox PARC by Geschke and Warnock, but Xerox refused to commercialize it so they left... Xerox takes the prize for bungling more technology inventions than any other company in history
There have been a few advanced products like Ventura Publisher, Quark Xpress, PageMaker, FrameMaker, and Adobe InDesign which addressed the higher end market, and now MS Word is being challenged by the free Google docs, so in a way the entire market has been frozen, and as there is no more revenue to be had in this area, we will probably not see many new products
I'd love to have a chat with you one day. I used to sell and use wordstar, Wordcraft (Commodore), WordPerfect, Spellbinder, Electric Pencil, Lotus Manuscript, IBM displaywrite (3-4-5?), Bristol Software Factory's Silicon office etc etc etc
Stephen Walters G7VFY.
After helping building WordStar 2000, i created a startup with ex-microsoft staffers called Beyond Words, and we made a product for Canon, just missed out on a deal with a big company, then under contract built DisplayWrite 5 Composer for IBM. You can reach me on Twitter as CodingFiend
Thank you sir! Corrections and additions made.
Do you remember whether or not the 6502 port saw a release or got dropped?
The 6502 CPU is the one that was used inside the early Apple computers. You added an 80 column card, and for a big discount and no service contract you had something that would replace the popular Wang word processing machine. The spreadsheet and word processor drove the computer revolution.
The only version of WordStar available for the Apple II required the Microsoft Z/80 SoftCard. There was never any version that ran on the Apple II's native 6502 CPU. I had an Apple II (in fact I still have it) along with the Z/80 SoftCard and Videx 80 column card necessary for running WordStar. WordStar along with dBase were somewhat famous for being the primary reason the SoftCard was so popular.
When I saw your comment, I thought maybe there was a 6502 release I'd never heard of, but if it existed, there is zero evidence of it anywhere on the Internet. Every contemporaneous article and advertisement I can find anywhere that talks about WordStar makes no mention of a 6502 version.
I would like to correct some more errors. There was NO WordStar for the EPSON HX-20,(two Hitachi 6301 CPUs at 614 kHz - Cannot run CP/M) but there was for the EPSON PX-8 (z80 cpu) which used a ROM for program storage, 128kb RAM disk and microcassette based mass storage system.
CP/M was possible on the z80 softcard for the Apple ][
The other factor missing was software piracy. There was no way to protect CP/M software and piracy was, to say the least, rampant.
I worked for UK computer store from 1979-1992 and we had real problem with customers who purchased one copy of ever program and then duplicated it. CP/M came with machines but dBASE][, wordstar, caxton's Cardbox, SuperCalc, Perfect Office (Which was garbage) were regularly copied. People would pirate the software and buy the book from their local bookstore.
There was a UK group, 'FAST', Federation against software theft' and they raid organisations, large and small, and made their findings and fines, public.
Thank you! I chose to remove that bit entirely. I had gotten that info from a more recent publication, but after your prompting I search for Epson literature of the time period. You are absolutely correct. I appreciate it!
Well, there was also the Epson PX4 as well, and, like the PX8, was sold in different countries under different names. All these machines ran CP/M and could run a huge library of CP/M software.
It would be useful to be able to do a pinch-zoom on mobile, the images ate unreadable without that ability. The zoom button doesn't make any difference on my Android phone.
I may be mis-remembering. After it was almost 50 years ago. MicroPro did make a custom version for some Japanese early laptops, the Epson Maple for example
So they were using cross-assemblers and overlays to fit in the tiny RAM spaces of the original PC's.
I was not involved in Wordstar, only WordStar 2000 which was written in C by a team of 12 programmers over a year period. Micropro had been offered a million to port WordStar to UNIX, but that offer was turned down, as Micropro made way more money on DOS with WordStar 2000, which in the IBM PC era, which along with VisiCalc and the databases that popped up were giving small businesses a huge boost. Suddenly big companies had worse automation than little ones.
It was a golden era for small business in America, where the advantages of big credit lines to lease mainframes worked against you.
The author of the "Game of Thrones" books Mr. Martin, i believe uses Wordstar or Wordstar 2000 to write all of his books. Wordstar had great ergonomics; if you were a touch typist you could control the cursor very quickly with control key shortcuts to move left and write a space or a word or to the line boundary. Using a mouse slows people way down if you are a fast typist, lifting your hands off the home row costs many milliseconds.
They did port Wordstar to the 8080 so maybe the other cross assembler. We should ask Jim Fox or Rob Barnaby.
I've been using WordStar for 40 years (as of next month), and continue to write all my books with it (I'm a Hugo Award-winning science-fiction writer); I explain why I love it so much here:
https://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm
I use WordStar 7.0D, the final MS-DOS version, under the DOSBox-X emulator (not plain DOSBox, but rather DOSBox-X, which has exellent specific WordStar support: https://dosbox-x.com/
I do have my TurboXT running Wordstar 5, but I also use Joe in Slackware on my workstation which has a WordStar emulation mode invoked as jstar :-)