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.

[Sarmat89]

Poor people who had to deal with that braindead software... especially those who had decode the garbage WS produced.

[guanaco]

I typed my M.Sc. thesis with WordStar.

Yeah, I'm that old

[JoeC]

Originally Posted by leebase

Very cool

Ditto. This is awesome. It takes me back many years.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

Poor people who had to deal with that braindead software... especially those who had decode the garbage WS produced.

I used WordStar for years. Loved the fact that my hands stayed on the keyboard's home keys and that you didn't have to worry about formatting — you could just write and write and write.

It wasn't hard to convert to formatted text with its ASCII utility.

[Sarmat89]

Wordstar cannot open DOS text files even in its programmer's mode, and it surrounds every non-ASCII symbol in the text individually with a SI/SO pair. Earlier versions couldn't do even that, being CP/M leftovers.

[DiapDealer]

A fan thread celebrating the free release of software people enjoyed (or just remembered fondly) isn't exactly hard to refrain from raining on. Just saying.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

Wordstar cannot open DOS text files even in its programmer's mode, and it surrounds every non-ASCII symbol in the text individually with a SI/SO pair. Earlier versions couldn't do even that, being CP/M leftovers.

Actually WordStar can open text files. They're called "nondocuments" and there is a specific "Open Nondocument" option in the Menu. But that wasn't what I claimed. I said that, using the Convert utility, you can change WordStar documents into text files for use in text editors or other word processors.

WordStar was not designed to be a text editor. It was designed to be a word processor but, even in Linux in 2024, I can still write in WordStar for DOS and convert my documents for use elsewhere.

The Convert utility actually allowed you to convert WordStar documents to many formats. There's probably a better choice than the text format, but I'm used to working with text documents so that's what I (personally) use.

[jackm8]

Long ago I read an introduction to a novel, it was either scifi or fantasy, where author thanked IT guy that helped him recover draft from a dying pc/laptop that was in an obscure format. I think that it dealt with this software.