Seymour Ivan Rubinstein (born 1934) is a pioneer of the PC software industry. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and after a six year stint in New Hampshire, later moved to California. Programs developed partially or entirely under his direction include WordStar, HelpDesk, Quattro Pro, and WebSleuth, among others. WordStar was the first truly successful program for the personal computer (in a commercial sense) and gave reasonably priced access to word processing for the general population for the first time.
Rubinstein began his involvement with microcomputers as director of marketing at IMSAI.
He currently lives in Northern California.
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During his teenage years, Rubinstein was a television repairman. After his military service he became a technical writer and continued his undergraduate studies at night.
In 1964, he was given the opportunity to participate in the design and implementation a classified system for identifying unknown vessels at sea by their sound fingerprint. Following his success with this and other related projects, he moved to New Hampshire to be put in charge of the computer software development for a line of IBM compatible programmable CRT terminals. As part of this assignment, Rubinstein went to San Francisco. Two years later, Rubinstein moved to the Bay Area and landed an assignment to implement a law office management system on a Varian Data Machines minicomputer. Following this, he formed the Systems Division of Prodata International Corporation which was subsequently acquired by Varian Data Machines. As a consequence, Rubinstein temporarily moved to Zürich, Switzerland to utilize the technology he developed as part of a branch banking system for Credit Suisse.
Upon his return to California, he visited the Byte Shop of San Rafael and began his love affair with the microcomputer.
Rubinstein founded MicroPro International Inc. in June, 1978. Subsequently, Rubinstein made an arrangement with Robb Barnaby, a programmer Rubinstein met at IMSAI. While at IMSAI, Barnaby wrote a screen editor which was called ‘NED.’ Rubinstein had Barnaby totally rewrite NED into a new product called “WordMaster.” MicroPro was officially launched in September, 1978 using Barnaby’s first two programs, WordMaster and SuperSort. Feedback from the computer store dealers, who were MicroPro’s first customers, said they wanted a program with integrated printing.
Rubinstein developed the specifications for the new program including many innovations unavailable in commercial word processing at the time, such as showing page breaks, providing an integrated help system and a keyboard design specifically for touch typists. Barnaby did the initial foundation for MailMerge, which was finished by others.
In mid-1979 was born the Wordstar word processor. A year and a half later, several IMSAI employees joined Rubinstein at Micropro, including 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 he called Surpass. This spreadsheet was later sold to Borland International. Borland renamed it Quattro Pro.
In 1990 Rubinstein was sued by Bill Millard, former CEO of IMSAI, 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 Holdings, 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 worked with Garnet R. Chaney to patent a series of discoveries regarding Content Discovery. This software connected to multiple search sites and used complex word algorithms to refine searches.
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:
"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