MicroPro International
More info
- Creator
- Seymour Rubinstein
- Released
- 1978
- Type
- Software company
The company that made WordStar the first best-selling word processor, then lost the whole market.
Seymour Rubinstein founded MicroPro in 1978, and programmer Rob Barnaby wrote WordStar for CP/M the same year. It showed text roughly as it would print — early for its day — and was driven by Ctrl combinations such as ^S, ^E, ^D and ^X, a diamond under the left hand that still survives in some text editors. Being bundled with the Osborne 1 and the Kaypro made it the standard.
The move to MS-DOS was sluggish, and in 1984 the company launched WordStar 2000, with keyboard commands different from the ones users knew by heart. They left for WordPerfect. The company renamed itself WordStar International in 1989 and was folded into SoftKey in 1994.