History of Computers - Wordstar
Wordstar was a word processing application created by MicroPro International in 1979. It was the first commercially successful word processing software and best selling program of the early eighties. [1] It began the long line of word processors that are always being changed and edited to work better for users. While today we have options between Microsoft Word, Open Office, and many others, before 1982 only a single program existed to dominate the market.[2]
Contents
Overview
Written originally for the CP/M operating system, the program had to be edited to support the commonly used MS-DOS because of the complete dominance of DOS over any other type of OS during the early 1980s. The earliest forms of the program were written completely by Rob Barnaby. Barnaby was a program writter working for MicroPro Intl. which was for the time owned almost entirely by Seymour I. Rubinstein. Rubenstein was the marketing genius behind Wordstar, and thanks to the coordination of the two, margins and word wrap-arounds were added to the program increasing it's marketability immensely, eventually leading to large profits that allowed Barnaby to take well deserved vacation. Barnaby never returned from his vacation however, and the later versions of the program starting with Wordstar 4.0 were built on new code written principally by Peter Mierau.[3]
Significance
Although Word Perfect was the far more influential follow-up to Wordstar, Wordstar had an enourmous importance as having the role as the first word processing application. Leading up to the creation of Wordstar, programmers had to make an application themselves to have access to a word processor becuase no earlier program had been nearly as efficient or possesing an installer. Word Processors have changed everything from our newspapers to our books, to our writing assignments tremendously. Were it not for Wordstar, universal word processors would be nowhere near where they are now thanks to the pioneering ingenuity of Rob Barnaby and MicroPro.
References
Links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar
http://www.wordstar.org/wordstar/history/history.htm
Page Creator: Logan Elliott
