My dad, Seymour Rubinstein, created WordStar. It’s amazing to witness this homage to its enduring legacy.
"Barnaby needed four months to code Wordstar on his IMSAI PCS 80/30 computer. This was done in assembler for Intel 8080 from scratch (according to Rubenstein Barnaby was the mad genius of assembly language coding), as Barnaby wrote 137000 lines of bullet-proof assembly language code. Only some 10-percent of Wordmaster code was used."
Edit: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 28(4):32-47 · November 2006 -> The Origins of Word Processing Software: 1976−1985 has an interesting section on Wordstar . https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3331079_The_Origins...
When I finally develop observable dementia among the last things to go will be WordStar keymappings, they were laid down so thoroughly in my long-ago teenage brain, along with the somewhat different Wordmaster mappings.
I don't remember when Micropro moved to Sausalito, but recall it was near the end of Wordstar's reign.
We had a phrase that described the value of the piracy of Wordstar. The "Wordstar Effect" held that the primacy of a file format was a huge boost to revenue even if you only captured 5% of paying customers.