WordStar, the first mainstream PC word processor, was just re-released for free. It’s been almost half a century since its launch. Those decades come with a strange history and a user base which includes Arthur C. Clark and George R.R. Martin.
Canadian sci-fi author Robert J. Sawyer put the WordStar bundle together and released it on his website. According to the writer, no complete archive for WordStar exists on the internet. His archive includes an MS DOS 7 version of WordStar, PDFs of the WordStar manual, tips from Sawyer, and emulator programs to run it on modern operating systems. You can try the original word processor on your computer with this re-release bundle. It’ll take some technical know-how to get WordStar up and running though.
The original word processor offers a deceptively simple but powerful interface that heavily relies on the keyboard. Sawyer says “it lets me interact with my computer more efficiently than any other interface I’ve yet seen.” Everything is done through keystrokes, which means fewer distractions once you start typing.
WordStar looks nothing like the word processors we have today, but it remains functional to this day. So much so that there are authors who regularly use it to write. Sawyer swears by it. George R.R. Martin, James Gunn, Paul Levinson, and many others still use it. Anne Rice believes the modern Microsoft Word is “pure madness” compared to WordStar. Even Arthur C. Clark favored WordStar.
Developed by MicroPro, WordStar was originally made for CP/M machines. CP/M was an old operating system for commercial computers. MS-DOS (a defunct OS from Microsoft) replaced CP/M, and WordStar was released for DOS. Towards the end of its life, WordStar was also released for Windows. By then, it had lost its market share and popularity against Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, and their likes.
The company itself faded into obscurity after Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep acquired MicroPro, after it had already been sold to Mattel and The Learning Company. Ever since late 1992, there have been no official updates released for WordStar. Many rewrites and clones popped up. But WordStar is still kept alive by a small community of enthusiasts who don’t want to part with their favorite composing tool.
Source: Robert J. Sawyer via The Register
