WordStar (thing)

The WordStar story begins in the late 1970's. The WordStar program was developed for MicroPro International by Rob Barnaby. Barnaby had recently left his position as head of the Software Development division at IMSAI, an early microcomputer manufacturer, where he had worked on a primitive line-based editor for CP/M called NED. WordStar expanded on NED, with advanced features like full screen editing. The first version of WordStar was released in late 1978 to astounding success. Version 1.0 of WordStar is notable for pioneering the concept of word wrap, and the well-known WordStar key bindings. These key bindings were so popular they were used in many other programs including the integrated editor in Borland's Turbo Pascal.

Version 2.0 of WordStar was released soon after and built on this success, but due to fears of piracy version 2.0 was heavily copy-protected. This alienated the hobbiest community, WordStar's largest market. Around this time, Rob Barnaby left MicroPro. Version 3.0, released in 1982, was the first version to run on MS-DOS. By now it also supported CP/M and CP/M-86 on a wide array of hardware, including the Apple II, TRS-80 and Osbourne 1. WordStar was unquestionably the leader in the word processing market, and IBM briefly considered reselling WordStar as the IBM endorsed PC word processor. MicroPro balked at the terms IBM dictated, so Big Blue went with John Draper's EasyWriter instead.

In the early 1980's, MicroPro began to look at reimplementing WordStar. AT&T was pushing for a UNIX port, and MicroPro was dealing first hand with the problems of porting and maintaining a program written in assembly language. A project was started to reimplement WordStar in C. In 1985, it was complete, and was released as WordStar 2000 on both MS-DOS and AT&T UNIX.

By this time, WordStar was steadily losing its market share to WordStar clones and a new upstart called WordPerfect. In 1986, MicroPro bought up one of the clones, a product called NewWord, and integrated the code into the original WordStar code base. This was released as WordStar 4, reviving the original product and orphaning WordStar 2000. This "original" version of WordStar was slowly improved over the next 5 years, until the final version, 7.0d was released in 1992. At this point, Windows was beginning to catch on. The company, by now renamed to WordStar International, bought up yet another third party word processor, this time a Windows based desktop-publishing program. It was released as WordStar for Windows, the third independant product to bear the WordStar name. WordStar for Windows made it to version 2.0, at which point development was stopped.