WordStar DOS 7.0d -- Chromebook

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

I'll second that!

All this talk brings back memories of my Kaypro II - good memories, I might add.

Wasn't that the machine they coined the term: Luggable?

[Quoth]

Osborne I?

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by theducks

Wasn't that the machine they coined the term: Luggable?

That and the Osborne I (which came first). They were 'luggable' and resembled medium-sized suitcases.

The Osborne 1 had better software, but the Kaypro II had the much larger screen. I wrote my first published porn novel on it.

I then later graduated to the 'Fat Mac' - a Macintosh with 128K of RAM! - and my whole world was transformed.

[RobertJSawyer]

I still use WordStar for DOS 7.0 Rev. D — the final version, released in December 1992 — and have written all 25 of my novels with it.

I've created a massive archive for it. Included are not only full installs of the program (as well as images of the installation disks), but also plug-and-play solutions for running WordStar for DOS 7.0 under Windows, and also complete full-text-searchable PDF versions of all seven manuals that came with WordStar — over a thousand pages of documentation.

I've also included lots of my own explanations on how to use and customize WordStar, many WordStar-related utility programs, and numerous other goodies.

You can get the archive here: https://sfwriter.com/ws7.htm

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by RobertJSawyer

I still use WordStar for DOS 7.0 Rev. D — the final version, released in December 1992 — and have written all 25 of my novels with it.

I've created a massive archive for it. Included are not only full installs of the program (as well as images of the installation disks), but also plug-and-play solutions for running WordStar for DOS 7.0 under Windows, and also complete full-text-searchable PDF versions of all seven manuals that came with WordStar — over a thousand pages of documentation.

I've also included lots of my own explanations on how to use and customize WordStar, many WordStar-related utility programs, and numerous other goodies.

You can get the archive here: https://sfwriter.com/ws7.htm

Thanks. You've done an incredible amount of work here. I'm downloading your archive now and am looking forward to exploring it. I've got all this on floppy disks and paper books in storage in another state, but I'll probably never use the original material again (or maybe never even see it again, as it may have been chewed up by critters by now).

I think this "release" probably deserves its own thread. I agree, nothing better than WordStar for writing. For the kind of writing I do, the Jstar flavor of JOE comes pretty close, but not nearly as many features.

[philja]

What joy !!! I came upon this thread while searching for something else and now I've wasted the best part of an evening on it.

It's brought back tons of memories. I've still got my slide rule but my Sinclair Cambridge calculator ended up in bits after I threw it at a wall. My later Oxford calculator was traded up by Sinclair for 2 Oxfords after I sent it back for repair. Older than that is my first portable typewriter (an Olivetti) which is still in a cupboard somewhere.

Around that time, I was running stocktakes in a steel tube works on punchcards, which required processing overnight on a large mainframe housed in a (very) large air-conditioned room. My first office desktop computer had the custom-built app coded in Basic and the data on large (8"?) floppies.

My first portable was a luggable, a 'Phillips' badged version of some other suitcase sized machine (maybe an Osborne?) with a tiny monochrome (greenish) screen and using 5" floppies. I flew with that machine a few times between France and UK. It used CP/M and I worked with WordStar. I've still got that machine with handbooks somewhere in store. I used first a dot-matrix printer and then upgraded to a daisy wheel (which I've still got somewhere - together with an old fax machine).

Later, I moved to a smaller Toshiba portable and spent a weekend wondering how to cope with DOS after CP/M without any handbook supplied by the seller.

Then in the office, I was given a Dell 286 and enjoyed working with WordPerfect. Colleagues in the US recommended Windows as a must-have so I bought Windows v1 and spent the afternoon loading it up from what seemed like hundreds of floppies. Windows wasn't an OS at that time. By the end of the afternoon, it was uninstalled and relegated to the office waste paper basket. And I continued with WordPerfect under DOS which suited me well.

I came back to Windows at v3.11, again after colleagues in the US said it had improved by that time. My next trauma came from attending a training course on the use of Word. I remember being horrified at the complexity of styles so I continued with WordPerfect which was fine until it was eventually taken over by Novell.

That period of history was dominated by the rapid increase in processor speed to the point that there was real interest and utility in buying the next generation as soon as it was released. So hardware was updated regularly.

My first linux installation was in the same year that I discovered the internet - around 1990-91 iirc, and it involved hours of trial and error to get a version of Slackware running and talking to the hard disk. Now my linux box is my main work tool but I keep a W10 box for a couple of applications that are not easily run on linux.

Since WordPerfect, I've tried Vi, Emacs and others but found OpenOffice and later LibreOffice Writer to be my preference these days. When I think of that early training course on Word and the horrors I experienced with styles, I still find it hard to believe that today I can't do without them, typically having five page styles, 10-15 paragraph styles and numerous text styles in any given document.

When talking to fellow writers, I'm constantly dismayed at their ignorance of styles and have attempted to convince them that they would find it easy to learn to set them up even in Word and that is one reason that I keep a copy of MS Office on the W10 box. Personally, I find it easier to set up styles in LibreOffice Writer than in Word but you can do it all in Word if that's all you've got.

[Dr. Drib]

I actually had to use a slide rule in school, as we all did during the very early 1960s. (That may give you an idea of my age: I'm between 72 and 100. )

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by philja

What joy !!! I came upon this thread while searching for something else and now I've wasted the best part of an evening on it.

(snippage for space)


When talking to fellow writers, I'm constantly dismayed at their ignorance of styles and have attempted to convince them that they would find it easy to learn to set them up even in Word and that is one reason that I keep a copy of MS Office on the W10 box. Personally, I find it easier to set up styles in LibreOffice Writer than in Word but you can do it all in Word if that's all you've got.

Lotsa luck with that. I can tell you--and this is not hyperbole--that this is effectively my line of work, assessing/analyzing manuscripts (by writers) to make into books, eBooks, etc. We've quoted well over 10,000 books and we've produced over 9K since '08-ish and thereabouts, most since 2010. Now...ask me how many manuscripts I've seen that have both headings and Styles? Or hell, even just headings?

I won't say I can count them on my digits--I can't--but it's shockingly close to that. I've tried, I really have, to convert writers to the joys of Styles but....they just don't want to hear it. I guess it keeps me in business, by and large, so I should shut up but their unwillingness to learn it and use things like the Nav Pane, etc. really continues to surprise me.

Hitch

[Quoth]

The dreaded glass typewriter syndrome.