Seymour I. Rubinstein
|
|
Seymour Ivan Rubinstein (1934 - ) is a pioneer of the PC software industry. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and later moved to California. Programs developed partially or entirely under his direction include WordStar, HelpDesk, and Quattro Pro among others. WordStar was the first truly successful program for the personal computer (in a commercial sense) and gave access to word processing to the general population for the first time. In some ways he might be called the typewriter killer.
Seymour began his involvement with microcomputers with IMSAI, makers of the famous machine from the movie Wargames. Rubinstein was hired to be the director of marketing. Some biographies incorrectly credit him as the V.P. of Engineering. IMSAI was owned by William H. Millard, founder also of Computerland. Millard began selling IMSAI computers to himself at Computerland at a loss, in an attempt "to make it up in volume". This issue has been adjudicated several times. The employees (stockholders) of IMSAI saw this as plundering their company to enrich Computerland, and decamped en-masse with Rubinstein to the new company MicroPro. They included most of the top engineering staff at IMS Associates, late IMSAI, including Rob Barnaby, Bruce Van Natta, Joe Killian, Dianne Hijacek, and Glen Ewing. Rubinstein left with $8,500 in cash, and used this money to start MicroPro International. Rubinstein eventually brought a venture capitalist named Fred Adler into MicroPro.
Before being involved in computers, he was a TV repairman.
He currently lives in Northern California.
| Contents |
Business Ventures
Rubinstein founded MicroPro International Inc. in 1978. MicroPro was the maker of the Wordstar word processor. In April 1982, Wordstar was patched to run under MS-DOS.
"So while WordMaster, SuperSort, and WordStar were developed on IMSAIs (I used mine til I got an IBM PC), few customers used them." -- Rob Barnaby in email to Mike Petrie 2 May 2000
In 1987, Rubinstein became involved with a spreadsheet called Surpass. This spreadsheet was later sold to Borland International. Borland International renamed it QuattroPro.
In 1990, Rubinstein was sued by IMSI regarding theft of trade secrets regarding WordStar. Rubinstein was successfully defended by Davis Wright Tremaine LLP [1] (http://www.dwt.com/practc/int_prop/iptech_clients.htm).
In a Video History Interview with the David Allison of the Smithsonian Institute, Bill Gates referred to Rubinstein as starting one of the first software companies [2] (http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/gates.htm).
In the 1995, he founded a company called Prompt Software to investigate document management, internet research, and patent a series of discoveries regarding Content Discovery.
One of his most recent associations is with Intesoft Systems (http://www.intesoftsystems.com/info/company.asp).
Stories About Rubinstein
According to the book The Silicon Jungle, Rubinstein, a science fiction fan, had once asked author Arthur C. Clarke about the possibility of a briefcase computer tapping into information from anywhere in the world. Of course Clarke had already thought of this, and predicted in Profiles of the Future that businesses would need "only the equivalent of a telephone number". Around the time of this question, Rubinstein already knew that Epson was going to be marketing a lapsized machine with Wordstar in ROM.
Arthur C. Clarke credited Wordstar with bringing him out of the retirement that he announced in 1978.
Quotations
- "I'm still searching for nirvana" - 25 August 1997
Improper Credit
Similar to many early pioneers in the software industry, Rubinstein is sometimes credited with actually writing the software that his companies have marketed. Some things Rubinstein is improperly credited with:
- Development of a BASIC compiler [3] (http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/pipermail/sluglug/2002-June.txt) The real BASIC compilers of the day were MBasic - Bill Gates's big success and CBasic by Gordon Eubanks. Rubinstein never had any involvement with a BASIC compiler. He was a COBOL man at that time.
- Developing WordStar - The actual code was written by Rob Barnaby [4] (http://www.imsai.net/history/ffc_hist/ffc_images.htm). The base code was originally an IMSAI program called NuEdit, which was spiffed up and named WordMaster in San Rafael. The features that turned WordMaster (a programming editor, similar to vi in some ways) into WordStar - the common man's word processor - were mostly Rubinstein's.
"Seymour was the marketing brains - it was he that said we should address word processing to get a larger market. The defining change was to add margins and word wrap. Additional changes included getting rid of command mode and adding a print function. I was the technical brains - I figured out how to do it, and did it, and documented it. The product's success I think related both to it being the right product (Seymour) and to it being a fairly good implementation given the equipment (me)." -- Rob Barnaby in email to Mike Petrie 3 May 2000
- Developing Quattro Pro - The original Quattro Pro was a DOS program. The development environment - a Modula-2 compiler and a windowing system and a crude spreadsheet - were developed in Texas by a company started by Bob Warfield. Rubinstein bought that program and hired the developers and brought on Bob Richardson, former chief programmer at MicroPro to work on the compiler. Surpass (the program name) was developed in Novato, California by Bob Warfield, Dave Anderson, Weikuo Liaw, and Bob Richardson. Barnaby, from the WordStar days did a minor amount of work, as did Jim Fox. Surpass was developed by Surpass Software Systems and at one time was a major spreadsheet competitor as measured by P.C. Magazine. Quattro was developed by Borland and was a colossal flop. Surpass got great benchmarks and was popular, but due to a bad marketing division was never widely sold. Ingram was given an exclusive on the program, and, Lotus being a MAJOR source of income for them, never sold it. Surpass did not have the money to sue, so the entire operation was sold to Phillipe Kahn who moved the development entirely to Scott's Valley. When Surpass was converted to Windows it became Quattro Pro, an extremely popular program - although the features such as Hot Links were largely first implemented in Surpass. Quattro Pro retained the original Modula-2 compiler for a time.
- Developing WebSleuth - A widely unknown program. The actual code was written by Garnet R. Chaney and Bob Richardson (formerly of Wordstar and Quattro Pro) This company suffered from a lack of funding and a succession of marketing departments that were clueless, for the most part. The only decent marketing effort there was spearheaded by Penelope Lamars. The rest of the time the marketing effort was run by people with no experience in the field, or whose only experience was selling training for Cisco routers. One Director of Marketing came from the food service industry, in keeping with Rubinstein's habit of hiring his girlfriends and overpaying them. The product is still being developed by a new company called Intesoft Systems. The President of Intesoft has a wide variety of experience in the international and governmental areas and may yet make a success of the technology and patents developed (by Chaney and Richardson). Rubinstein is a principal in the new company.
External Links
- A Potted History of Wordstar (http://www.wordstar.org/wordstar/history/history.htm)
- Fire-In-The-Valley Chronology with 1977 picture of Seymour (http://www.fireinthevalley.com/fitv_timeline_1979.html)
- Software vet plots comeback (http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/1996/11/11/story3.html), November 11, 1996 San Francisco Business Times
- Starting Up Again - and Again and Again (http://www.businessweek.com/1997/34/b354133.htm) August 25, 1997
- Listing of American Software Pioneers (http://www.pcmuseum.se/texter/amerikanskapionjarerrext.htm)
- Wordstar 2000 in Unix Version (http://www.computerwoche.de/heftarchiv/1985/19851018/a71840.html)