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 8080 assembly 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 on. It was already popular when its inclusion with the Osborne 1 portable computer made the program the de facto standard for much of the small computer word-processing market.Īs the market became dominated by the IBM PC and later MS-Windows, this same portable design made it difficult for the program to add new features, and affected its performance. Because all of these versions had relatively similar commands and controls, users could move between platforms with equal ease. WordStar was written with as few assumptions as possible about the operating system and machine hardware, 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, and Rob Barnaby was the sole author of the early versions of the program. It was published by MicroPro International, originally written for the CP/M-80 operating system, and later written also for MS-DOS and other 16-bit PC OSes.

It dominated the market in the early and mid-1980s, succeeding the market leader Electric Pencil. WordStar is a word processor application for microcomputers. CP/M-80 (original on Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80)

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