One of our members and WordStar

[PeterT]

https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/...the_last_ever/

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free
The preferred tool of Arthur C Clarke, Anne Rice and George R R Martin

Before WordPerfect, the most popular work processor was WordStar. Now, the last ever DOS version has been bundled and set free by one of its biggest fans.

WordStar 7.0d was the last-ever DOS release of the classic word processor, and it still has admirers today. A notable enthusiast is Canadian SF writer Robert J Sawyer, who wrote the book that became the TV series Flashforward.

Thanks to his efforts you can now try out this pinnacle of pre-Windows PC programs for professional prose-smiths. Sawyer has taken the final release, packaged it up along with some useful tools — including DOS emulators for modern Windows – and shared the result. Now you, too, can revel in the sheer unbridled power of this powerful app.

Robert is a long time MobileRead member, along with a keen user of the Kobo readers.

More details at https://sfwriter.com/blog/?p=5806

[leebase]

Very cool

[PeterT]

I have memories of first being introduced to WordStar on my Osborne luggable computer. Then I discovered Borland and Turbo Pascal where the editor interface used the WordStar style keys. From there it was onto my Eagle luggable PC where I added SideKick to the mix (again the same editor interface).

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[Quoth]

I used Wordstar on CP/M before there was an IBM PC in the UK or Ireland. An Apple II with a Z80 card, 80 column card and replacement keyboard with added 2 x 1M byte 8" floppy drives. The Apple II text and keyboard was primitive and floppy 100K and slow.

Later I used and sold NewWord, a Wordstar clone, on CP/M (Amstrad PCW) and MS-DOS.

Then in early 1990s I wrote a text editor for DOS in Modula-2 that used Wordstar keys and Menu/Mouse and worked OK on NT and Win 3.x. It also had hyperlinking so a document could be an outline and each chapter in a separate file. It wasn't constrained by RAM as the part in RAM was only a window of the file, It also had a foot pedals (buttons on joystick port) and used the sound card to play audio dictation which could be copied in to HDD at twice speed, if the dictation cassette/microcassette was recorded at half speed. It had no formatting at all. You optionally used markup recognised by DTP or Word or Sun Office. Like a better version of Notepad, but limited only by disk space. Non-NT Notepad (Win2, 3.x. Win9x etc) could only edit 64 K or less files.

Ten years+ later I was using notepad++ for capturing writing and MS Word 2002/XP to edit.

My last "Wordstar" foray two years ago was a Joyce Emulator on Linux (available on Windows) and reading 3" and 3.5" CP/M floppies (simple adaptor for 3" drive) on my last PC with a real floppy port. I copied the Amstrad PCW CP/M files (Newword, but like older wordstar) and then wrote a Perl script to convert to ASCII as the original WS use the 8th bit to mark word and line breaks etc.

I did write a novel on Wordstar and a History of Computers & Communications.

It was good in its day for business correspondence, mail merge and a draft of a novel.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Robert is a long time MobileRead member, along with a keen user of the Kobo readers.

More details at https://sfwriter.com/blog/?p=5806

Mr. Sawyer posted information about this in the Writing forum, but I'm happy that The Register wrote an article about it and this has become more front and center. I still regularly use the text editor JOE (its Jstar variant) because of its support for WordStar keystrokes.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...9&postcount=64

[PeterT]

Yes. I saw his post on Writing only after posting this: (

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[rcentros]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Yes. I saw his post on Writing only after posting this: (

I'm happy that you did post here because I thought the news deserved its own thread.