Your rambling is very much appreciated. I'm terribly sorry to hear about Jim Fox, it is often those who are the real knowledge behind development that get lost or left behind for a multitude of reasons, which, more often than not, are problems or a fallout with financial backers, entrepreneurs or it's the work of ruthless competitors. Unfortunately, this happens not only in programming and IT but in every endeavor imaginable. Other names in the IT game that immediately come to mind that fit this description are Gary Kildall, Phil Katz and Aaron Swartz; they all deserved a much better run.
I mentioned here in another post that I used to use WordStar to write/edit assembly (ASM) as well as high-level languages source files and the illustration I've used is an excerpt from the BIOS of my Godbout CompuPro 816 S-100 8085/8086 dual boot computer. You mentioned Jim Fox for a very good reason and I similarly do so for Bill Godbout who died tragically in the Camp fire in November 2018. You'll be aware of the fire but some who are not in CA may not be:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/11/25/camp-fire-d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Godbout
http://vcfed.org/wp/2018/11/13/r-i-p-bill-godbout-79/
Bill Godbout may not have remembered me but I certainly remember him. I met him in Anaheim at a computer conference and I talked with him for ages about CompuPro and his S-100 boards—I even recall a three-way conversation with him when someone inquired about the reliability of his memory boards. The conversation revolved around a then common concern about the potential for new high speed RAM with a clock speed of 20MHz [wow!] in that stray random alpha particles may cause memory errors and thus we should always employ parity checking to avoid the problems. In fact, it was Bill who actually raised the matter.
He was a very pleasant and helpful guy and I'm so pleased to have met him. To think he died in a fire—in one of the most horrible ways imaginable—is hard to contemplate. It is especially hard and upsetting when the person who has died is not just another statistic but someone one can actually put a face to.
Re Jim Fox again, I recall another conversation not with Rubinstein but with a local WordStar agent around the time of the release of WordStar 2000 but mainly about the development of version 7 and earlier (as that's where my interests were). He told me much about it and I'm now racking my brain to remember what he said. The only thing that comes to mind was that it was mainly the work of one person (this seemed a bit strange to me as I thought that MicroPro would have had many more programmers). I also seem to recall an article about the development of WordStar written by either Jerry Pournelle of Byte fame (who had a CompuPro system) or perhaps it was in InfoWorld. It's a damn nuisance I can't remember.