Seymour I. Rubinstein
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Seymour Ivan Rubinstein (born 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.
Rubinstein began his involvement with microcomputers as director of marketing at IMSAI. Prior to this, he was a television repairman.
He currently lives in Northern California.
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[edit] Business Ventures
Rubinstein founded MicroPro International Inc. in 1978. MicroPro was the maker of the WordStar word processor. Several IMSAI employees joined him there, including Rob Barnaby (creator of the first version of WordStar, known as "ned"), Bruce Van Natta, Joe Killian, Dianne Hajicek, and Glen Ewing.
In 1982, WordStar was ported to 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 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 [1].
In a Video History Interview with the David Allison of the Smithsonian Institution, Bill Gates referred to Rubinstein as starting one of the first software companies [2].
In 1992 he founded UDICO, Inc., a company which—using a "surveillance engine" licensed from a French company—sought to create an interactive context sensitive help engine which would intercept "F1" calls for help within Microsoft Word and direct users at that point to an interactive training session for the feature which they sought help with. Though this product (Developed by T. Lindgren and A. Bennedsen) was never released, the company did release a WinHelp authoring tool called W.Y.S.I. Help Composer.
In 1995 he founded a company called Prompt Software to investigate document management, internet research, and patent a series of discoveries regarding Content Discovery, this software connected to multiple search sites and used complex word algorithms to refine searches.
One of his most recent associations is with Intesoft Systems.
[edit] 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 lap-sized machine with WordStar in ROM.
Arthur C. Clarke credited WordStar with bringing him out of the retirement that he announced in 1978.
Part of Rubinstein's legacy is the invention of the $495 selling price for PC software, a price level that ruled the desktop for over a decade. According to Rubinstein, he arrived at this price by walking down Fourth Street in San Rafael, going into businesses and asking them what they'd be willing to pay for word processing software with WordStar's capabilities.
Rubenstein also claims to have created the acronym "WYSIWYG" (What You See Is What You Get) and, perhaps despicably, the software license scheme used by all companies today, in which a user doesn't actually own the software they "purchased" but rather has purchased the option to use the software.
[edit] Quotations
[edit] 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 are:
- Development of a BASIC compiler [3]. The real BASIC compilers of the day were MBasic — Bill Gates' 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 code was actually written by Rob Barnaby [4]. The base code was originally an IMSAI program called NuEdit, which was spiffed up and named WordMaster in San Rafael, California. 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. 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 but never sold it because Lotus was a major source of income for them. Surpass did not have the money to sue. Quattro was developed by Borland at about the same time sold considerably more units than Surpass and was probably profitable for Borland, but both products were clearly far behind the market leader Lotus. Phillipe Kahn saw the chance to double the development team and get some new technology ideas by buying the Surpass product at a bargain rate, giving him another shot at gaining the lead. So the entire operation was sold to Borland who moved the development to Santa Cruz and Scott's Valley. The Surpass codebase was converted to C and merged with existing Borland code from Quattro to form Quattro Pro, an extremely popular program — although the features such as Hot Links were largely first implemented in Surpass.
- Developing WebSleuth — A widely used metasearch software for Windows 98. The actual code was written by Garnet R. Chaney and Bob Richardson (formerly of WordStar and Quattro Pro) with two weeks support from Jon Hibbins and team with some interface re-design and installation improvements. This company suffered from a lack of funding. The marketing effort was spearheaded by Penelope Lamars. The product is still being developed by a new company called Intesoft Systems. Rubinstein is a principal in the new company.
