Priced at $495 and $40 for the manual, by early 1980, MicroPro claimed in advertisements that 5,000 people had purchased WordStar in eight months. MicroPro began selling the product, now renamed WordStar, in June 1979. 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. 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 8080assembly language. After leaving IMSAI, Rubinstein planned to start his own software company that would sell through the new network of retail computer stores.

Rubinstein was an employee of early microcomputer company IMSAI, where he negotiated software contracts with Digital Research and Microsoft. 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 onwards. Already popular, its inclusion with the Osborne 1 computer made the program become the de facto standard for much of the word-processing market.Īs the computer 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. As all of these versions had relatively similar commands and controls, users could move between platforms with equal ease. WordStar was deliberately written to make as few assumptions about the underlying system as possible, allowing it to be easily ported across the many platforms that proliferated in the early 1980s. Starting with WordStar 4.0, the program was built on new code written principally by Peter Mierau. Rubinstein was the principal owner of the company, Rob Barnaby was the sole author of the early versions of the program. It was published by MicroPro International, and written for the CP/Moperating system but later ported to MS-DOS. WordStar is a word processor application that had a dominant market share during the early- to mid-1980s.

Wordstar 6.0 file extension