Fatal Board · VIDEO ESSAY

The Rise and Fall of WordStar: The California Word Processor That Ruled Every American Office

Subscribe to the channel! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb0ps9eCp0y6yP1Xg4sDDFw?sub_confirmation=1 In 1979, a small company in San Rafael, California shipped a $495 program written in assembly language by one man in about four months. Within five years, WordStar was running the American office. Law firms, insurance companies, newsrooms, small businesses, novelists, and hundreds of thousands of word processing operators whose entire job description was built around it. MicroPro International became the largest microcomputer software company in the world, with revenue approaching $70 million a year. Then, at the peak, the company approved a replacement product with a completely different command set, and threw away the one thing it actually owned: three quarters of a million pairs of trained hands. This is the full story of WordStar and MicroPro International. Seymour Rubinstein and the insight that software, not hardware, would be the business. Rob Barnaby and the 137,000 lines of assembly. The control key diamond. The Osborne 1 bundle that put WordStar on every desk in America. WordStar 3.3 and the peak. The WordStar 2000 decision of 1984. The two product civil war, the dealer channel, the lost years, and the quiet walkover to WordPerfect in Orem, Utah. The Windows era, the 1994 merger into SoftKey, and the strange final chapter inside one of the worst acquisitions in American corporate history. And the reason George R. R. Martin still writes on WordStar 4.0 today. Sources and further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroPro_International https://www.wordstar.org/ https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos https://computerhistory.org/blog/ Seymour Rubinstein oral history interview, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California InfoWorld, product coverage and market share reporting, 1983 to 1987 PC Magazine, WordStar 2000 product reviews, 1985 BYTE Magazine, CP/M era software coverage, 1980 to 1983 The Wall Street Journal, reporting on MicroPro International's 1984 public offering and subsequent restructuring This channel is made by an enthusiast who loves business and technology history — nothing more. All videos are for educational and entertainment purposes only and reflect my personal views and interpretations. I research each story carefully using publicly available sources, but errors or omissions can happen. Nothing here is professional, financial, or legal advice, and this channel is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any company mentioned.