Unlike a great deal of the software that the first few major waves of computer programming produced, the word processor was slightly anomalous in that it was created to satisfy the needs of writers rather than those of mathematicians and engineers. After the introduction of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) in the late 1960s, there was some lofty talk about computers soon being able to take the place of books. The idea of using computers to do the work of typewriters also began to gain momentum.
Specialist computer hardware designed to act as a word processor already existed. It had a keyboard, a screen, and a printer all housed in one stand-alone unit that utilized modern technology to create printed, processed documents. But one young entrepreneur saw the chance to create a software program that would not be tied to any one particular machine.
Seymour Ivan Rubinstein (b. 1934) had been working as a director of marketing for the IMSAI Manufacturing Corporation—a company that made microcomputers—but left in 1976 with $8,500 in cash to set up his own company, MicroPro International, Inc.
Rubinstein brought a number of IMSAI employees with him to staff his company, most notably Rob Barnaby. Within a few months, Barnaby had completed two programs: Word Master and Super Sort.
Barnaby's magnum opus, however, came with WordStar, the first commercially successful word processing software. Feature-rich and easy to use, it fought off all of the emerging competition on the market to become the most popular word processing software in the world.
