Stan and I have often talked about what would have happened if we hadn’t sold the company to MicroPro. We had a nice little business going, sales increased 3-4x the year NewWord3 came out, and we were very close to stealing MicroPro’s lucrative government business, which would have doubled or tripled our sales. So we could have become a medium-sized company pretty quickly.

When Leon came to MicroPro, we felt that there was finally a chance that they would wake up and do something right. They had a large cash hoard they could use to reinvigorate their business. And, of course, Seymour was running around telling everybody he’d sue us and put us out of business, which killed some important sales.

When we met with Leon, we truly thought he was serious about turning the company around. That could have been our death knell.

We thought we could work within the company to make it successful – and we did for a while. Inside MicroPro, the acquisition was often referred to as the Newstar acquisition of MicroPro. But there was so much baggage at MicroPro – so many of the legacy employees were so tied to their old ways of doing things, that all the advances we made reversed in less than a year.

But hey, for one year it was grand. Stock price quadrupled. The company posted the first profit since its IPO. We had some good marketing starting – a “Word Stars on WordStar” campaign that included famous users of WordStar who all agreed to be included in testimonials (without compensation). And we fixed WordStar 2000.

We had a chance to regain #1, but we didn’t continue to execute.

And BTW, we sold for $3.1 million – which was about 3x what my venture capital friends said we’d get. It was actually a large acquisition for its day.

One more point Peter alluded to: we developed NewWord under strict guidance and council of Larry Sonsini at Wilson, Sonsini, et.al. The prevailing legal opinions of the day were that the way we cloned WordStar was perfectly legal. (To everybody but Seymour Rubinstein.)

when I got to MicroPro, there was still one copy of the source code, but it was on the hard drive of an Altos microcomputer that was on its last legs (the hard drive was squeaking badly). The source code did not match any of the shipping versions of WordStar, though. And we had to clean it up before we could begin working with it.

At the time I started writing NewWord, we were worried about a MicroPro lawsuit. That’s one of the reasons that I was very careful to write every stitch of code from scratch. Even so, there was talk in the industry about lawsuits related to look and feel issues, and we were a little surprised that MicroPro didn’t pursue it more. By the way, at the time they aquired NewWord, they did evaluate the source code for any copyright violations.

I sort of blame Lotus for starting THAT whole sub-industry of look and feel lawsuits when they claimed that nobody else could use F1 for HELP.

Was Mitch Kapor out of the daily decision making process by then? He seemed like the ultimate cool guy up ’til that happened.