As you all know, I continue to use WordStar for DOS 7.0 as my word-processing program. It was last updated in December 1992, and the company that made it has been defunct for decades; the program is abandonware.
There was no proper archive of WordStar for DOS 7.0 available online, so I decided to create one. I’ve put weeks of work into this. 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.
↫ Robert J. Sawyer
WordStar for DOS is definitely a bit of a known entity in our circles for still being used by a number of world-famous authors. WordStar 4.0 is still being used by George R. R. Martin – assuming he’s still even working on The Winds of Winter – and there must be some sort of reason as to why it’s still so oddly popular. Thanks to this work by author Robert J. Sawyer, accessing and using version 7 of WordStar for DOS is now easier than ever.
One of the reasons Sawyer set out to do this was making sure that if he passes away, the people responsible for his estate and works will have an easy way to access his writings. It’s refreshing to see an author think ahead this far, and it will surely help a ton of other people too, since there’s quite a few documents lingering around using the WordStar format.
I need to go on a retro word processing journey. I used a lot of very obscure ones in the 80’s early 90’s. Were they as good/bad as I remember? I had a lot of pain in highschool with one that directly hurt my gpa, due to its British origin and poor performance.
Back in the day I found WordPerfect Suite or whatever they called it to be significantly better than the MS equivalent offering, but I was pretty quick to move from the DOS based options to the GUI platforms as it was a huge upgrade for my graphics dominated requirement. However, I was working in a Novell dominated environment. A lot of my early work colleagues stayed on a DOS or some other CL platform, mostly Sun or SG. I still love the amber or green screen for fatigue free focus, my younger colleagues just hate it, for them everything has to be a form.
Hot take: authors should not be touching a word processor with a ten foot pole.
It’s hard to get your copy edited without a word processor. I want some type of versioning in place when I share it with my various editors (not really sure if Word Star even offers that). On a related note, doesn’t LibreOffice have the ability to import Word Star documents.
I hate to admit it but my last book (a textbook) and my current project (my first sci fi book) are being done in Google Docs because of ease of sharing with everyone. I’m not likely to get everyone else to switch to an open source alternative.
@SeanEParson
Nailed it, the article frames all using a platform as the same, but we aren’t, and that’s the very same reason many desktop apps end up bloated, We don’t use all that stuff, but we aren’t everyone, every feature appears because there is a demand. Perhaps G.R.R. Martin is a hermit hobbit, and so works free of collaboration, but many do not!
My only criticism of modern app bloat is that it’s barely optimised, the priority has been to add features but not to add them well. It’s going to get worse with cloud based apps because effectively they aren’t being delivered by limited a hardware resource, they have an almost infinite backend available. It’s making the coding worse, and at this moment in time AI has gone even further in the wrong direction, but it won’t change because comes largely without penalty and bigger profits.
there’s WordTsar for the fans
http://wordtsar.ca/
and it runs on OpenBSD too