News Cult Sci-Fi author repackages WordStar 7 DOS — 680MB zip has software, emulators, manuals, and tips squished in

[Admin]

Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer, Robert J. Sawyer, has painstakingly packaged a distribution of WordStar 7.0d for DOS. Sawyer says he spent weeks of his time to craft this full install of the seminal word processor, making it possible to be 'up and running on a Windows computer in a matter of minutes.'

Cult Sci-Fi author repackages WordStar 7 DOS — 680MB zip has software, emulators, manuals, and tips squished in : Read more

 

[derekullo]

Word processing without a mouse sounds ... harder!

 

[USAFRet]

Word processing without a mouse sounds ... harder!

Yes, it was!

 

[SunMaster]

Wordstar! Only 567 1.2mB floppies needed.

 

[slightnitpick]

Word processing without a mouse sounds ... harder!

From the linked blog comments:

Rob
August 6th, 2024 at 10:04 am

Thank you! I appreciate the kind words.
But the point, Michael, is that WordStar has all of that — complete mouse point-and-click support — in addition to its wonderful touch-typist’s interface. It is 100% fully CUA-compliant (with fully mousable pulldown menus and dialog boxes following industry-standard guidelines). In fact, since Microsoft and others have drifted away from actually adhering to industry standards (God save us from the Ribbon!), WordStar for DOS is the most CUA-compliant wordprocessor you will find:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

 

[Mindstab Thrull]

I only knew of WordStar at all from WordPerfect and early MS Word save options. I remember using WP 5.0 (remember when you didn't have to specify if a PC program was for DOS or for Windows? Pepperidge Farms remembers...) and one thing I thoroughly enjoyed about it was the ability to see the format tags, so if you accidentally double-bolded something, for example, you could get rid of the excess. It was great for figuring out why a section of a document wasn't formatting the way you wanted it!

Mindstab Thrull
Nomming ur sanities since 1837 BSE (Before the Sarpadian Empires)

 

[NinjaNerd56]

Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer, Robert J. Sawyer, has painstakingly packaged a distribution of WordStar 7.0d for DOS. Sawyer says he spent weeks of his time to craft this full install of the seminal word processor, making it possible to be 'up and running on a Windows computer in a matter of minutes.'

Cult Sci-Fi author repackages WordStar 7 DOS — 680MB zip has software, emulators, manuals, and tips squished in : Read more

Now if only someone will do this for WordPerfect…a far better tool than WS!

 

[slightnitpick]

and one thing I thoroughly enjoyed about it was the ability to see the format tags

I think Word has this ability too, it's just hidden somewhere in all of the options.