Word: wordstar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...slash its payroll by 8,000 workers, or 9%. Wang, which lost $424 million during the past fiscal year, may be pushed into a merger. Former rising stars in personal computers, notably Commodore and Wyse Technology, are losing money. So are major software developers, including Ashton-Tate and WordStar International...
...same vein, many computer customers believe the industry's innovative efforts at the moment are failing to fill users' needs. They believe the expansion during the early and mid-1980s was based largely on the proliferation of such breakthrough products as the Apple II personal computer (1977); WordStar, the wordprocessing program (1979); VisiCalc, an electronic accounting ledger or spreadsheet (1979); the IBM PC (1981); Apple's Macintosh, with its advanced graphics capability (1984); and desktop- publishing gear like Aldus PageMaker...
...computer buffs visiting Pakistan's historic city of Lahore, it seemed too good a bargain to pass up. A shop called Brain Computer Services was selling brand-name computer programs, such as Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar, which can cost several hundred dollars in the U.S., for as little as $1.50 each. During a period of nearly two years, from early 1986 to late 1987, scores of Americans -- most of them students and backpackers -- paraded through the small carpeted store, snapping up cut-rate disks for use on their computers back home...
Even the instruction manuals provided to help users over the difficult first steps can range from barely acceptable to awful. Such bestselling programs as WordStar, for writing and editing, and dBase II, which helps organize business records, originally had terrible manuals, although the manufacturers have just issued improved instructions. Some software, including both WordStar and dBase II, now contains tutorial discs that show novices how to use the programs in a simple, step-by-step fashion...
...software, even the systems software inside the computer, can be protected by copyright, but that does not stop dedicated pirates. Ric Giardina, general counsel of MicroPro, which publishes WordStar, estimates that as many as 20 fraudulent copies of a program may be made for every one sold. Manufacturers are aggressively defending their products. In February Lotus Development sued Rixon, a Silver Spring, Md., computer-accessory manufacturer, for $10 million, charging it made copies of Lotus' popular business program 1-2-3 for its own use. Declared Lotus President Kapor: "Software piracy is the theft of intellectual property." When...