As you all know, I [Robert J. Sawyer] 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.
I've also included lots of my own explanations on how to use and customize WordStar, many WordStar-related utility programs, and numerous other goodies.
Carolyn Clink kindly did the scanning of the manuals. When she was done, I said to her, "Countless WordStar users will thank you." She replied, "Oh, I think I can count them." ;)
And it's true that the WordStar die-hard community is pretty small these days (George R.R. Martin still uses the even-older WordStar 4.0). But the program has been a big part of my career — not only did I write all 25 of my novels and almost all of my short stories with it (a few date back to the typewriter era), I also in my earlier freelance days wrote hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles with WordStar.
I wanted there to be a monument to this, the finest word-processing program ever created. As Anne Rice said, "WordStar was magnificent. I loved it. It was logical, beautiful, perfect. Compared to it, Microsoft Word is pure madness."
And, I suppose I'm thinking a bit about my legacy, too. Once I'm gone, my literary estate will need to deal with my electronic manuscripts, and my executor should be able to work with them on her own computer rather than just mine. Also, there are countless other writers who are no longer with us who wrote with WordStar, including Arthur C. Clarke; I hope this archive I've created will be of use to scholars.
Anyone can have WordStar for DOS 7.0 up and running on a Windows computer in a matter of minutes using this archive; with just a little bit more work, WordStar for DOS 7.0 also runs just fine under Linux and Mac OS.
Here's the link to the full 680-megabyte archive:
WordStar was first introduced in 1978 and the final release — WordStar for DOS 7.0 Rev. D — came out in December 1992. The program has never been updated since, and the company that made it has been defunct for decades; the program is abandonware.
The initial versions were for CP/M on the 8080 and Zilog Z80 and the MS-DOS version runs under an MS-DOS emulator, such as DOSBox. WordStar 7 was released in 1992 and was the final version of the famous editor. WordStar is still favored by many the famous Arthur C Clarke, Anne Rice, George R R Martin and many others.
Previously:
(2020) Old Fart's Quiz [Updated]
(2014) Game of Thrones Author Writes on a DOS System
Related Stories
Ryan Reed reports that when most Game of Thrones fans imagine George R.R. Martin writing his epic fantasy novels, they probably picture the author working on a futuristic desktop (or possibly carving his words onto massive stones like the Ten Commandments). But the truth is that Martin works on an outdated DOS machine using '80s word processor WordStar 4.0, as he revealed during an interview on Conan. 'I actually like it,' says Martin. 'It does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key.' 'I actually have two computers,' Martin continued. 'I have a computer I browse the Internet with and I get my email on, and I do my taxes on. And then I have my writing computer, which is a DOS machine, not connected to the Internet.'
It is time for a quiz slightly biased toward older, larger systems giving old farts an unfair advantage.
Remember: googling the answers is cheating but we have no way of enforcing it. But it is less fun.
1. What is the advantage of unidirectional printing on a dot-matrix printer?
2. What is the distance between the black marks on a thick yellow ethernet cable (10BASE5)?
3. Which CPU did the SuperMAX from DDE have? (trick question)
4. How do you exit from a DOS program (interrupt number + subfunction)
5. Which interactive game from 1986 had the settings tame..lewd, and a scratch'n'sniff card was in the box?
6. Why is a memory dump called a "core" dump?
7. Which CPU did the Siemens PC-D have?
8. Which new features were in the file system in DOS 2.x when compared to DOS 1.x ?
9. What is the visual administration tool in AIX called?
10. Name the file server in the Amoeba OS.
11. What is the biggest difference between C64 joysticks and PC-joysticks (we are talking about the original ones that had to connect to a game port)?
12. What is the maximum line length in COBOL? (trick question)
13. Where is the main office of the Sirius Cybernetics Complaints Department located?
14. "eioio" instruction on Power. What does it do?
15. Before Borland introduced their TurboVision, which toolkit was widespread for implementing windows/ISAM-files in Turbo Pascal?
16. Why is the Unix function for creating a file called "creat" and not "create"?
17. When was SMP supported by Windows? And OS/2?
18. Which number did the Fidonet nets have in your country? (bonus point if you remember your matrix address)
19. How do you mark a block in Wordstar?
20. Which came first: Amiga, Norton Commander, or HP Laserjet?
[20200306_005148 UTC; Updated to add:
Please, when posting a reply, bracket your answer in spoiler tags, like so:
<p>My answer to question #n is:</p>
<spoiler>
Write your answer here.
</spoiler>Which, when presented on the site, will look like:
My answer to question #n is:
Write your answer here.
Thank You! --martyb]
(Score: 5, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday August 10 2024, @10:11AM
It's still less shit than Office 365.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Saturday August 10 2024, @12:44PM (5 children)
I find this article interesting, but not because I want to install WordStar. Rather it shows that most of what we are offered today is not better than what was available 30 years ago.
If you look at the list of famous names that are using it it demonstrates that the WordStar of 1992 met a lot of people's requirements of a word processor. WordStar was, and is, advanced enough that they can write books, screen plays, letters etc. Very little of what has been added since to a wide range of word processors is much more than pretty bells and whistles. In many cases they have been changed (including changing the format of the saved files) just so that a company can sell yet more word processors because if you do not buy the latest version then you will be incompatible with all of those who have bought it. There are probably very few people who actually need the myriad of 'enhancements' that the new version offers.
Some 'modern' word processors are actually a nightmare to use, with images moving and formatting changing complete pages for a trivial correction elsewhere.
In Linux land we debate word processors and editors such as Vi, Emacs etc which are keyboard based and not designed just for button clickers. WordStar also allows the user to enter commands without removing his or her hands from the keyboard. But when I look at the modern offerings there is simply no possible way that I could remember a keyboard command for all of the 'essential' options that they offer, nor do they offer one.
I would prefer a word processor that would allow me to install the editing and processing functions that I think are essential, and then allow me to allocate a keyboard based command to activate it. Whatever happened to KISS? Perhaps I am just using what I already have incorrectly?
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Saturday August 10 2024, @02:00PM (2 children)
I did find it interesting, for similar and different reasons. The list of named authors tho might not matter all that much. They are old, so they picked this cause it was what was available at the time they started or transitioned over from the typewriter or writing it all by hand. Then they got used to it cause they write so much that it just stuck and they saw no reason to change or update. So it's perhaps not all about it being so great for writing.
I agree that most everything needed is still here and that a lot of what is in say Word today is mostly just bells and whistles. I can't really see much different between new, or current, Word and whatever was released in the 90's. Except it got more bloated. They changed a lot of things and added a lot of things but as a word processor it's about the same. It's the fancy UI. But that doesn't make you a better writer.
The thing I found interesting about it was that I though that 680 megabytes for the archive seemed a bit large, even if he had double installations in it for various dosboxes. There seems to be some duplication in that regard, disk images, unpacked things. But then I looked a bit closer at it and the scanned documentation is about half the archive. It has that feature of DOS that I do not miss -- the 8.3 file naming convention. I do not miss that at all.
Still will I install Wordstar again? I don't think so. It's not that Word is great or anything. But I'm lazy, it's already here and well it's setup now sort of the way I like it and I tried to minimize the bullshit. Most things I write are in somewhat unstructured text files, with Sublime Text, anyway and then I just copy that over to Word when I need to finalize things for those people that want it in .docx and can't handle other things -- they are not latex people. I have been thinking about testing WonderPen, but have not gotten around to it yet. The page layout is the problem of someone else so I rarely have to care about those aspects.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday August 10 2024, @02:40PM (1 child)
That's why Wordstar is better than Word.
Imagine if you're making a bookcase out of wood planks and you need to drill some screw holes to hold it all together.
There are "carpenters drill bit sets" in little pocket sized cases that do pretty much everything an amateur wood-butcher would want to do and they cost nothing and don't get in your way when you're working and fit in your pocket and weigh nothing if you have to climb a ladder onto a roof for some project or whatever. Really Great Product. Sure the metal is shite and can't drill anything tougher than maybe oak and trying to drill steel would result in the steel laughing at the cheap drill and you don't have enough sizes to build a steam engine. But, if you're building a bookcase, features you don't need or want are not a good sales item.
The next step down from "carpenters drill bit sets" would be something like my Hout cases with full machinist sets of fractional, number, and letter drill sizes. This is less useful to a bookcase maker because its heavy, takes up space, needs to be worked around, and have to sort thru roughly a hundred drills in each case. Its really handy for a machinist doing repair work but fairly useless for most bookcase makers.
The next step down from that is having an entire warehouse from McMaster Carr to sort thru every time you want to drill a quarter-inch hole for a bookcase. Every little activity is so difficult and takes so long that you'll avoid using even the simplest features because the whole system is so cumbersome. That is life with Microsoft Word.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Saturday August 10 2024, @03:15PM
That's why Wordstar is better than Word.
And that's because WordStar gets the job done and stays out of the way unlike M$ Word. Newer is not better. Different is not better. Only better is better, and recent versions of m$ Word for Windows are not an improvement over say Word 2.0c for Windows. The new versions of m$ Word are not streamlined in regards to time-motion, but efficiency stopped being a goal in computing and lately even applications are falling victim to the 'engagement' mentality which is about time wasting rather than being able to accomplish a task easily and quickly. Delays and snags raise stress levels even if they are not completely noticeable at the conscious level.
The more complicated the word processing program UI and the horrible operating system needed to run it, the more distractions and delays there are. From what I read of the work flow of famous authors, such as Sawyer, they want as few distractions as possible from getting their words and ideas in the form of words into the computer. I know some amateurs that feel similarly and write there creative works using Notepad-like utilities. The less overhead the better. The more responsive the system the better. Along the lines of responsiveness, subjectively the snappiest system I ever had was WordStar on an 80286 running (IIRC) DR-DOS.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bloodnok on Sunday August 11 2024, @12:26AM (1 child)
If you want to keep it simple, just say no to word processors. Word processors have become the hammer that makes every writing task look like a nail. They make typesetting look easy (it isn't) and encourage style over substance.
I hate word processors with a passion because for most people most of the time they are the wrong tool for the job.
Most stuff I receive by email just needs to be a few sentences long; the formatting does not and should not matter, but people choose to format their words with far more care than they choose them.
<rant>And even if their prose does need formatting, they shouldn't send me something that can only be opened in a word processor. For Deity's sake it's bad enough that people chose to use a word processor to write the crap; why do they want to make me use one in order to read it?</rant>
As for Mr Sawyer: well, he chose to use the tool that *was* appropriate for the job. And, thankfully, he doesn't expect us to use that tool to read his works, so, hats off to him.
__
The Major
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday August 11 2024, @06:56PM
Whatever happened to KISS?
The same thing that happened to a living minimum wage; corporate stupidity coupled with greed.
A Russian operative has infiltrated the highest level of our government. Where's Joe McCarthy when we need him?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by tbuskey on Saturday August 10 2024, @01:06PM (1 child)
LaTeX is great at letting the author worry about chapters, paragraphs, references without worrying about the fonts used. You can change the font used in headers, paragraphs, throughout the doc by changing one thing. References can be auto numbered too.
Word took the individual control of WordStar & Wordperfect and merged it into a wysywig of items that look document wide but are local only.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2024, @03:18PM
Roughly contemporary with Wordstar and likely also TeX/LaTeX was from Mark of the Unicorn (Boston, MA area). First called Mince (Mince Is Not Complete Emacs) and Scribble (typesetting/formatting, subset of Scribe, similar to TeX) for CP/M that ran on 8080 & Z-80 systems. After MS-DOS appeared, the two were combined into FinalWord II, which was later sold to Borland and the final version was sold as Sprint Wordprocessor.
Like Wordstar and some other early word processors, the FWII screen is nearly all for composing, just one status/command line at the bottom, F- function keys popped up simple menus. I remember Jerry Pournelle making a big deal about this--he wanted to see as many words as possible at once while writing, back when screens were limited to fixed character display. His choice might have had no status lines on screen!
I used FWII for software documentation and also a 1000 page engineering reference book. Just as with TeX, most document formatting commands could be global which made major re-organizations of the work very easy. For example, I set the book up to print from a master file (like a make file) that called all the chapters--changing the order moved a chapter and automatically changed all the chapter & section numbering, tables of figures and tables sorted out correctly, and re-generated internal cross references to the correct page numbers. It does what you would expect a computer to do--keep track of all the variable & numbered items in a structured document. Multiple passes by the formatter allowed forward references to be resolved correctly.
It keeps a swap file that (even on a floppy-disk-only system) is never more than a few keystrokes behind. In case of system crash (common back then, imo) the supplied recover program sorts things out and puts you back where you were, with multiple open files in different buffers.
FWII still runs fine (and *very* fast) under DOSbox, with a 50 line x 80 character display. It's useful occasionally when I need to look at something I did long ago. Modern printer support is fairly easy--FWII can write Postscript (ascii) output which is read perfectly by SumatraPDF (and Sumatra can save as a .pdf for distribution), and before Sumatra I used Adobe Distiller to make .pdf files.
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Saturday August 10 2024, @02:27PM
Nice idea. Not a criticism, seems to achieve his goal. My goal/interests lie more along retrocomputing and Wordstar was really a CP/M program ported to msdos (and a zillion other platforms) so I did everything short of downloading his 1 gig zip trying to find anything non-MSDOS and did not seem to find anything.
AFAIK at this time the "best" CP/M wordstar archive is at
http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/text/wordstar-collection.html [retroarchive.org]
Or possibly
http://cpmarchives.classiccmp.org/whatsnew.php [classiccmp.org]
Although there are a zillion other sites, etc.
Anyway, cool idea, etc.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by owl on Saturday August 10 2024, @03:15PM (4 children)
How long until he receives a DMCA takedown notice because some company, somewhere, does still own the copyright of WordStar 7.0d for DOS and even though that same company likely has not even offered for sale any WS70d disks for 25+ years, their lawyers just gotta protect those copyrights, because, you know, maybe they might be valuable again in ten years or something.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Sunday August 11 2024, @06:12AM (3 children)
That assumes that the "somewhere" company knows they hold those rights.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday August 11 2024, @06:58PM (2 children)
And still has the copyright registration number.
A Russian operative has infiltrated the highest level of our government. Where's Joe McCarthy when we need him?
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Monday August 12 2024, @05:02AM (1 child)
Tom's Hardware alludes to several ownership changes:
So it might be possible that some company owns the pieces, even if the Tom's Hardware article is very light on the details in that area.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 12 2024, @08:22PM
Someone always owns the pieces. Well, in theory you can shut down a corporation without selling the rights, but it roughly never happens.
It seems MicroPro International Corporation got bought out by SoftKey International in '93. SoftKey was a BIG name in cdrom shovelware and likely thought people would want to pay $9.95 for "ONE THOUSAND WORDSTAR ADDON SPECIAL TEMPLATES PLATINUM EDITION CDROM" or something like that. AFAIK that did not work out.
They did a rename in '98 to "The Learning Company" and tried to pivot into educational stuff. They got brutally critiqued in the financial press for making some of the worst mergers in history (presumably not the Wordstar merger).
Educational software being kids-adjacent, Mattel got all hot and bothered to buy them as a toy company around 98
IIRC the merger was so awful they initially valued the merger at $4B, then marketed it as Mattel's $1B software division, then lost a fifth of a billion dollars in one year, tanking Mattel's stock price by $2B overall. Great Job Guys! This was the dotcom era so losses like that were still considered a "win" relative to other even worse failure dotcom mergers, LOL.
Gores group bought Mattels entire software division for about $30M. So Mattel only lost $4B-$30M or $3.970B on the deal. Insert Simpsons "ha ha".wav here LOL.
Here it gets murky. Gores split up the carcass and sold some parts to Ubisoft (yeah, that Ubisoft) and some to Riverdeep Interactive Learning.
Riverdeep got NASDAQ delisted and pretty much shut down.
Meanwhile Houghton Mifflin publishers used to be pretty big but they collapsed and got sold to creditors and somehow a third company decided to merge the carcass of Riverdeep with the carcass of Houghton Mifflin to create, eventually, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
They went into immense debt trying to merge with Harcourt, and around the 08 financial crisis they crashed and burned and did some debt to equity conversion thing to stay sort of afloat, and its possible they no longer own Wordstar or maybe they never did or maybe they still do.
Eventually they went public just in time for the iPad boom in K12 education, whoops. They ended up selling all their software stuff (presumably including Wordstar?) to HarperCollins. Yeah, that HarperCollins the NewsCorp people. They seem almost exclusively interested in selling books and exited the software game AFAIK.
So, a copyright claim would have to come from Ubisoft the game publisher or HarperCollins the book publisher, or maybe an unknown third party.
Honestly I think anyone distributing Wordstar is pretty safe. There seems to be no benefit for anyone to spend the billable lawyer hours to "prove" they own an ancient word processor. Someone MIGHT do it in the sense that there is no such thing as bad publicity so anything that gets them in the news is good news.
If you think I'm your lawyer giving you personal legal advice, then you're on crack, usual legal disclaimer, etc. I do know a thing or two about corporate-stuff but the above is merely my opinion.