support. Problems with piracy Columnist John Dvorak noted: "WordStar may have been the most pirated software in the world, which in many ways accounted for its success. (Software companies don’t like to admit to this as a possibility.) Books for WordStar sold like hot cakes and the authors knew they were selling documentation for pirated copies of WordStar. The company itself should have just sold the documentation alone to increase sales. This was the wink-wink-nudge-nudge aspect of the industry at the time and everyone knew it. So when WordStar 2000 arrived with a copy protection scheme, everyone should have predicted its immediate demise." Besides the ready availability of third-party books explaining WordStar in detail, the program's extensive and configurable onscreen help facility (help text appeared in a resizable window at the top of the screen) made it easy to use an illegal copy. WordStar 2000 At the time, the IBM Displaywriter System dominated the dedicated word processor market. IBM's main competition was Wang Laboratories. Such machines were expensive and were generally accessed through terminals connected to central mainframe or midrange computers. When IBM announced it was bringing DisplayWrite to the PC, MicroPro focused on creating a clone of it which they marketed, in 1984, as WordStar 2000. WordStar 2000 supported features such as disk directories, but lacked compatibility with the file formats of existing WordStar versions and also made numerous unpopular changes to the interface. Gradually competitors such as WordPerfect reduced MicroPro's market share. MultiMate, in particular, used the same key sequences as Wang word processors, which made it popular with secretaries switching from those to PCs. BYTE stated that WordStar 2000 had "all the charm of an elephant on motorized skates", warning in 1986 that an IBM PC AT with hard drive was highly advisable to run the software, which it described as "clumsy, overdesigned, and uninviting ... I can't come up with a reason why I'd want to use it". WordStar 2000 had a user interface that was substantially different from the original WordStar, and the company did little to advertise this. However, its lasting legacy on the word processing industry was the introduction of three keyboard shortcuts that are still widely used, namely, Ctrl+B for boldfacing, Ctrl+I for italicizing, and Ctrl+U for underlining, text. Newstar WordStar became popular in large companies without MicroPro. The company, which did not have a corporate sales program until December 1983, developed