WordStar for DOS
August 6, 2024 11:13 AM Subscribe
Hugo and Nebula-winning sci-fi writer Robert J. Sawyer was sysop of the Compuserve WordStar forum. Now, he's taken the files of the last released version of seminal word processor WordStar 7.0D for DOS, released in 1992, its company long defunct, and released it, ready to run with two DOS emulators, manuals, and odds and ends from the old Compuserve forum libraries, on his website in a 649 megabyte ZIP download: The Complete WordStar Archive. WordStar is still beloved of some professional writers, including George R.R. Martin. Why use WordStar in 2024? You can read his essay about that.
What's in the 649MB, which expands out to nearly a gigabyte? Most of it is PDF manuals and other documentation; some of it is the emulators; 17.7MB are the Compuserve forum archives.
If you decide to try it, know that by default WordStar expects its directory to be C:\WS. Run either C:\WS\DOSBox-X\DOSBox-X.exe or C:\WS\vDosPlus\vDosPlus.exe. It should start WordStar automatically. Read -README.TXT (in the WS directory, and with the hyphen) for the beginners' startup guide.
If you load -README.WS into WordStar, you'll notice that the formatting markup is visible by default. You can hide them with Ctrl-O then D. While functions are menu-accessible, WordStar had extensive and intelligently-chosen keyboard shortcuts. You can read Robert's article on WordStar for more about those. WordStar has so many shortcuts that they're divided into categories, Ctrl-O, Ctrl-K, Ctrl-P, followe by another key. If you press the Ctrl-letter, after a moment a reminder box of shortcuts will appear. Helpful!
Selecting text will take getting used to. The GUI-like Shift-Arrow shortcut for selecting and expanding selections doesn't work. You'll want to mark text to perform operations on: Ctrl-K B to mark the beginning of a block, and Ctrl-K K to mark its end. Selections persist even as you enter text!
The preview function brings up a hi-res window with your document presented in it as it will print. That will change the state of the emulator, which might still be full-screen, or might switch it to a window. If the mouse works in this state (yes WordStar for DOS supports the mouse), choose Exit > Original Page, or Alt-E then O to return to the editor.
When it comes time to save, remember: DOS only used eight-character filenames with a three character extension, a limitation it carried over from CP/M. The emulators present long filenames to WordStar as the first six characters, then a tilde plus a number.
What's in the 649MB, which expands out to nearly a gigabyte? Most of it is PDF manuals and other documentation; some of it is the emulators; 17.7MB are the Compuserve forum archives.
If you decide to try it, know that by default WordStar expects its directory to be C:\WS. Run either C:\WS\DOSBox-X\DOSBox-X.exe or C:\WS\vDosPlus\vDosPlus.exe. It should start WordStar automatically. Read -README.TXT (in the WS directory, and with the hyphen) for the beginners' startup guide.
If you load -README.WS into WordStar, you'll notice that the formatting markup is visible by default. You can hide them with Ctrl-O then D. While functions are menu-accessible, WordStar had extensive and intelligently-chosen keyboard shortcuts. You can read Robert's article on WordStar for more about those. WordStar has so many shortcuts that they're divided into categories, Ctrl-O, Ctrl-K, Ctrl-P, followe by another key. If you press the Ctrl-letter, after a moment a reminder box of shortcuts will appear. Helpful!
Selecting text will take getting used to. The GUI-like Shift-Arrow shortcut for selecting and expanding selections doesn't work. You'll want to mark text to perform operations on: Ctrl-K B to mark the beginning of a block, and Ctrl-K K to mark its end. Selections persist even as you enter text!
The preview function brings up a hi-res window with your document presented in it as it will print. That will change the state of the emulator, which might still be full-screen, or might switch it to a window. If the mouse works in this state (yes WordStar for DOS supports the mouse), choose Exit > Original Page, or Alt-E then O to return to the editor.
When it comes time to save, remember: DOS only used eight-character filenames with a three character extension, a limitation it carried over from CP/M. The emulators present long filenames to WordStar as the first six characters, then a tilde plus a number.
Probably the first word processor I used on a MS-DOS computer, and certainly one of the best. Now to download the DOSBox-X for MacOS and see how this one compares.
posted by wellvis at 11:29 AM on August 6
posted by wellvis at 11:29 AM on August 6
Oh goodie, we get to live the "WordStar vs. Word" wars all over again! 😄
(For the record, I really liked WordStar but Word's WYSIWYG won me over in the long run)
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:31 AM on August 6
(For the record, I really liked WordStar but Word's WYSIWYG won me over in the long run)
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:31 AM on August 6
I recall learning WordStar on DOS in the 80s, so when I discovered HTML (around 1992) I was already equipped to succeed by marking up bold and italic text!
I understand that it became WYSIWYG in later releases, but by then I was on to Macintoshes and DTP...and then I found BBEdit.
posted by wenestvedt at 11:40 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I understand that it became WYSIWYG in later releases, but by then I was on to Macintoshes and DTP...and then I found BBEdit.
posted by wenestvedt at 11:40 AM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I still have fond memories of WordPerfect and its "reveal codes" functionality that was akin to viewing and editing HTML. I think that Word also had something similar but it was never as complete and powerful as what was in WordPerfect. I seem to also recall that WordPerfect 5.2, the last major version before 6.0 introduced WYSIWYG, was particularly powerful and usable.
posted by ElKevbo at 11:42 AM on August 6 [7 favorites]
posted by ElKevbo at 11:42 AM on August 6 [7 favorites]
multiple megabytes of binaries to use what once required < 60k 40 years ago encompasses a lot of what's wrong with computers today. I totally relate to wanting to hang onto it, though. You'll have to pry vim from my cold dead hands. :wq
posted by roue at 11:46 AM on August 6 [5 favorites]
posted by roue at 11:46 AM on August 6 [5 favorites]
George R.R. Martin breathes a sigh of relief, until he realizes that people will actually expect the last couple of books now.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:49 AM on August 6 [3 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:49 AM on August 6 [3 favorites]
I feel like the "typewritten page vs manuscript page" dichotomy Sawyer sets up is maybe not that huge a gap; I'm told that the entire publishing industry uses Word as its base format for exchanging documents, including stuff like comments from the editor/proofreader?
Not that there's anything wrong with using an old tool, I have artist friends who feel that Photoshop 6 does everything they need and keep an old computer around to host it. If Sawyer can sit down at his emulated MSDOS machine and bang out another award-winning novel without having to learn a single new thing about the way his tools work then obviously he's gotten his toolset very well configured to his hand; this week I'm fussing around with learning an animation program and it's super annoying to not be able to whip around it like I can whip around the pile of scripts, plugins, and custom shortcuts that have accreted around a couple decades of mostly using Adobe Illustrator.
posted by egypturnash at 11:53 AM on August 6
Not that there's anything wrong with using an old tool, I have artist friends who feel that Photoshop 6 does everything they need and keep an old computer around to host it. If Sawyer can sit down at his emulated MSDOS machine and bang out another award-winning novel without having to learn a single new thing about the way his tools work then obviously he's gotten his toolset very well configured to his hand; this week I'm fussing around with learning an animation program and it's super annoying to not be able to whip around it like I can whip around the pile of scripts, plugins, and custom shortcuts that have accreted around a couple decades of mostly using Adobe Illustrator.
posted by egypturnash at 11:53 AM on August 6
WordPerfect, with its excruciatingly arcane command set, ate WordStar's lunch in the DOS era. With its 5.x versions dominant everywhere to the point that it was being taught in school, it even, in the 6.0 version, attempted to make the leap into the WYSIWYG GUI world then made a feeble attempt to survive on Windows before Word ate its lunch. The Amiga versions were terrific, though. Of WordPerfect, I mean.
Even then, long after WordStar was gone, you could load up a WS file in Word and print that bad boy out or convert it to something modern. It's only with relatively recent versions of Word that the conversion modules for most legacy formats were removed.
WordStar itself was the killer app for CP/M. There were others, like Multiplan and dBase II, even MicroPro's own CalcStar, but WordStar was why people bought these big, chunky, heavy computers. It was the system-seller. There's software that, to this day, still implements the Ctrl-W,A,S,Z cursor movement.
On MS-DOS, WordStar barely showed up for long at all, even though it was arguably superior to more or less everything until Borland Sprint came along. Even then, Sprint could be easily configured to emulate the behavior of WordStar—or almost anything else that came before it—going so far as to offer it as an install option.
posted by majick at 11:53 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
Even then, long after WordStar was gone, you could load up a WS file in Word and print that bad boy out or convert it to something modern. It's only with relatively recent versions of Word that the conversion modules for most legacy formats were removed.
WordStar itself was the killer app for CP/M. There were others, like Multiplan and dBase II, even MicroPro's own CalcStar, but WordStar was why people bought these big, chunky, heavy computers. It was the system-seller. There's software that, to this day, still implements the Ctrl-W,A,S,Z cursor movement.
On MS-DOS, WordStar barely showed up for long at all, even though it was arguably superior to more or less everything until Borland Sprint came along. Even then, Sprint could be easily configured to emulate the behavior of WordStar—or almost anything else that came before it—going so far as to offer it as an install option.
posted by majick at 11:53 AM on August 6 [4 favorites]
AN INTERFACE DESIGNED FOR TOUCH TYPISTS
this. this. this.
posted by infini at 12:19 PM on August 6 [2 favorites]
this. this. this.
posted by infini at 12:19 PM on August 6 [2 favorites]
emacs and LaTeX for life! (Kidding, I could probably muddle my way back through LaTeX if needed, but boy wasn't that a word processor for programmers and math geeks)
posted by drewbage1847 at 12:23 PM on August 6 [2 favorites]
posted by drewbage1847 at 12:23 PM on August 6 [2 favorites]
A large chunk of my younger brain was spent in the WWIV BBS message editor, and it used that ^KX stuff. Guess Wayne Bell was a fan of Wordstar too!
posted by Rhomboid at 12:29 PM on August 6 [2 favorites]
posted by Rhomboid at 12:29 PM on August 6 [2 favorites]
My dad used Wordstar on an old Kaypro for a short while. A few years later I used MacWrite and wondered how word-processing could be done any other way (speaking as someone who 18 months prior to this had typed up high-school reports on an Olympia typewriter).
As mentioned up thread, I went through a Word 3, 4 phase which peaked at 5.1a before nose-diving at 6. By which time I'd switched for BBEdit for most composition and I'd slot the text into something like ClarisWorks for basic layout (ClarisWorks Draw module was vastly under-rated - you could pop in linked text panes - basic DTP that shipped with every Mac through most of the 90's).
But I didn't use Wordstar at all myself - just a few years too early for me. I will try it out though.
posted by phigmov at 12:29 PM on August 6
As mentioned up thread, I went through a Word 3, 4 phase which peaked at 5.1a before nose-diving at 6. By which time I'd switched for BBEdit for most composition and I'd slot the text into something like ClarisWorks for basic layout (ClarisWorks Draw module was vastly under-rated - you could pop in linked text panes - basic DTP that shipped with every Mac through most of the 90's).
But I didn't use Wordstar at all myself - just a few years too early for me. I will try it out though.
posted by phigmov at 12:29 PM on August 6
WordStar for MS-DOS came out in 1982, I started using it around 1985 and it was my only word processor until I got a computer in university sometime in the early 90's with Windows 3.1 and MS Word. Word was a revelation in ease of use. I later switched to WordPerfect for windows. I was so happy to never have to futz around with WordStar again. I do not miss non-GUI word processers at all, but I do miss WordPerfect and "reveal codes" since my work switched MS products for everything.
A while back I installed WordStar on one of my vintage machines, an IBM 5155 luggable that I used back in the 80's in high school, updated with a modern solid-state hard drive because I'm not going to try messing with 5.25" floppy disks in this day in age. WordStar was still just as annoying to use as I remembered. Of course, even back in the day when my eyes were young, using a computer with a 5.5" amber screen for writing documents didn't help. Sure, there is some nostalgia to it, lots of memories of caffeine-fueled late nights desperately trying to get a report done for class the next day, and I still remember far more shortcuts than I expected. But no way would I ever go back to that to actually write something.
posted by fimbulvetr at 1:00 PM on August 6
A while back I installed WordStar on one of my vintage machines, an IBM 5155 luggable that I used back in the 80's in high school, updated with a modern solid-state hard drive because I'm not going to try messing with 5.25" floppy disks in this day in age. WordStar was still just as annoying to use as I remembered. Of course, even back in the day when my eyes were young, using a computer with a 5.5" amber screen for writing documents didn't help. Sure, there is some nostalgia to it, lots of memories of caffeine-fueled late nights desperately trying to get a report done for class the next day, and I still remember far more shortcuts than I expected. But no way would I ever go back to that to actually write something.
posted by fimbulvetr at 1:00 PM on August 6
emacs and LaTeX for life! (Kidding, I could probably muddle my way back through LaTeX if needed, but boy wasn't that a word processor for programmers and math geeks)
Same but serious and I am not even a math geek.
Some decent LaTeX alternatives have been emerging lately like SILE and Typst but I'm not quite ready to make the jump yet especially now that with Tectonic it's so easy to bring LaTeX along.
Oh and I'm definitely Emacs for life at this point.
posted by donio at 1:09 PM on August 6 [1 favorite]
Same but serious and I am not even a math geek.
Some decent LaTeX alternatives have been emerging lately like SILE and Typst but I'm not quite ready to make the jump yet especially now that with Tectonic it's so easy to bring LaTeX along.
Oh and I'm definitely Emacs for life at this point.
posted by donio at 1:09 PM on August 6 [1 favorite]
I like how explicit markup makes it easier for me to decide what the document should look like. I've used emacs for LaTeX, then also for three O'Reilly books (BocBook XML), and of course WordStar way back. WYSIWYG is frustrating when it doesn't do what you want and you have to clear all formatting in a block of text, i.e. Google Docs
posted by mdoar at 1:14 PM on August 6 [2 favorites]
posted by mdoar at 1:14 PM on August 6 [2 favorites]
BTW, worried as I always am for the longevity and availability of this kind of artifact when it sits on someone's little web server somewhere, I've hucked a copy on the Internet Archive.
posted by majick at 1:36 PM on August 6 [3 favorites]
posted by majick at 1:36 PM on August 6 [3 favorites]
If you want to use a WordStar clone that runs on modern OSs, there's WordTsar – A Wordstar clone.
→
Oddly enough, I did that last week: Robert J. Sawyer Complete WordStar 7.0 Archive : MicroPro International Corporation : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive. I also made sure that there was a mirror on the Wayback Machine
→
It's so big because it contains high-quality scans of all of the manuals, plus multiple ready-to-go setups to run under modern emulators, all with cross-platform documentation. vim isn't small, either: I have a quite minimal installation on my Ubuntu box, and it's consuming over 100 MB of disk space (not including dependencies). /usr/bin/vim.nox — what my system runs on the rare occasions when I type ‘vi’ — is a 4.2M binary.
posted by scruss at 2:48 PM on August 6 [6 favorites]
→
I've hucked a copy on the Internet Archive.
Oddly enough, I did that last week: Robert J. Sawyer Complete WordStar 7.0 Archive : MicroPro International Corporation : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive. I also made sure that there was a mirror on the Wayback Machine
→
multiple megabytes of binaries to use what once required < 60k 40 years ago encompasses a lot of what's wrong with computers today
It's so big because it contains high-quality scans of all of the manuals, plus multiple ready-to-go setups to run under modern emulators, all with cross-platform documentation. vim isn't small, either: I have a quite minimal installation on my Ubuntu box, and it's consuming over 100 MB of disk space (not including dependencies). /usr/bin/vim.nox — what my system runs on the rare occasions when I type ‘vi’ — is a 4.2M binary.
posted by scruss at 2:48 PM on August 6 [6 favorites]
I will always remember my first word processor; Select on the Kaypro (cpm). It got the job done.
posted by krisjohn at 3:06 PM on August 6
posted by krisjohn at 3:06 PM on August 6
A large chunk of my younger brain was spent in the WWIV BBS message editor, and it used that ^KX stuff. Guess Wayne Bell was a fan of Wordstar too!
I, too, was a WWIV sysop back in the day.
/s
posted by panama joe at 3:17 PM on August 6
I, too, was a WWIV sysop back in the day.
/s
posted by panama joe at 3:17 PM on August 6
> multiple megabytes of binaries to use what once required < 60k 40 years ago
> encompasses a lot of what's wrong with computers today.
Yeah, I agree, it's a giant bummer that we can emulate entire bespoke hardware stacks in software nowadays.
I liked the old days better, when if you wanted to compute on a particular platform, you just went out and bought that platform. Simple, pure, and efficient, just as gods and Jobs intended.
posted by Sauce Trough at 3:46 PM on August 6 [1 favorite]
> encompasses a lot of what's wrong with computers today.
Yeah, I agree, it's a giant bummer that we can emulate entire bespoke hardware stacks in software nowadays.
I liked the old days better, when if you wanted to compute on a particular platform, you just went out and bought that platform. Simple, pure, and efficient, just as gods and Jobs intended.
posted by Sauce Trough at 3:46 PM on August 6 [1 favorite]
Also word processors peaked with WordPerfect 5.2 for DOS. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words of fiction on an old Toshiba laptop with an amber plasma display and a real nice chonky keyboard. There's a technology past that's worth romanticizing!
posted by Sauce Trough at 3:47 PM on August 6 [3 favorites]
posted by Sauce Trough at 3:47 PM on August 6 [3 favorites]
The wysiwyg preview in Wordstar seemed like some kind of wizardry back in the days before PC GEOS and Windows 3.0.
posted by wierdo at 6:08 PM on August 6 [2 favorites]
posted by wierdo at 6:08 PM on August 6 [2 favorites]
Also, the thing I hated about Wordperfect for DOS is that if you accidentally launched it and didn't either just know how to use it or have the F key cheat sheet sitting on the keyboard, you couldn't even figure out how to exit the thing. Time to hit the reset button!
posted by wierdo at 6:15 PM on August 6 [1 favorite]
posted by wierdo at 6:15 PM on August 6 [1 favorite]
egypturnash, reading through this for the first time in a few years, I think you're right. While I think the way Wordstar treats selected blocks is superior to anything else, the endless page metaphor just doesn't win me over. I can move around just as easily in a Word document as I can in Wordstar (when I remember the keyboard commands) or a text editor. A Word document presents itself as pages on the screen, but you scroll up and down just as easily.
I mostly missed being a Wordstar user, being solidly in Commodore land in the 1980s (yay Speedscript) until I landed on MS-DOS and had a job that made me use WordPerfect, but I admire Wordstar's keyboard setup anyway and love the way it used overlays to swap code and documents in and out of RAM to overcome the 64K memory limit on CP/M machines. I've often wondered why modern software doesn't do this more often, instead of insisting that an entire file fit into memory, even when we have fast disks we can swap to.
I also admire Robert Sawyer's dedication to this very retro, very useful bit of software. This archive is very welcome.
posted by lhauser at 8:48 PM on August 6 [1 favorite]
I mostly missed being a Wordstar user, being solidly in Commodore land in the 1980s (yay Speedscript) until I landed on MS-DOS and had a job that made me use WordPerfect, but I admire Wordstar's keyboard setup anyway and love the way it used overlays to swap code and documents in and out of RAM to overcome the 64K memory limit on CP/M machines. I've often wondered why modern software doesn't do this more often, instead of insisting that an entire file fit into memory, even when we have fast disks we can swap to.
I also admire Robert Sawyer's dedication to this very retro, very useful bit of software. This archive is very welcome.
posted by lhauser at 8:48 PM on August 6 [1 favorite]
Something is just so wholesome about several famous authors going through all this trouble to keep 30 year old software cranking on modern machines. Sysadmins, I'd expect this from. Authors, I would not.
I'm really curious if any of the WordStar-diehards have tried a text editor like vim or emacs. I use neovim with several plugins and find the experience to be remarkably similar to that described in WordStar (and it of course runs on anything and receives regular updates).
posted by gunwalefunnel at 9:42 PM on August 6 [4 favorites]
I'm really curious if any of the WordStar-diehards have tried a text editor like vim or emacs. I use neovim with several plugins and find the experience to be remarkably similar to that described in WordStar (and it of course runs on anything and receives regular updates).
posted by gunwalefunnel at 9:42 PM on August 6 [4 favorites]
I still have fond memories of WordPerfect and its "reveal codes" functionality that was akin to viewing and editing HTML.
I still miss that functionality when I'm wrestling with some abomination of a document created by someone for whom the only key to use when aligning text is the space bar.
I never really used WordStar beyond having a look at it a couple of times, but I used WP5.2 so much that I didn't need the F-key template at all, having memorised each and every function. But I've only recently stopped ticking the boxes in the Excel setup that let me emulate the navigation of Lotus 1-2-3. Of course, I only miss WP and Lotus because I haven't used them for so long. I'm sure I would be horrified to be actually re-united with functionality like responding to an incorrect formula in a spreadsheet by simply beeping and refusing to accept it or having to use symbols to piece together borders around a table.
posted by dg at 11:10 PM on August 6 [2 favorites]
I still miss that functionality when I'm wrestling with some abomination of a document created by someone for whom the only key to use when aligning text is the space bar.
I never really used WordStar beyond having a look at it a couple of times, but I used WP5.2 so much that I didn't need the F-key template at all, having memorised each and every function. But I've only recently stopped ticking the boxes in the Excel setup that let me emulate the navigation of Lotus 1-2-3. Of course, I only miss WP and Lotus because I haven't used them for so long. I'm sure I would be horrified to be actually re-united with functionality like responding to an incorrect formula in a spreadsheet by simply beeping and refusing to accept it or having to use symbols to piece together borders around a table.
posted by dg at 11:10 PM on August 6 [2 favorites]
→
I seem to remember a comment on Robert Sawyer's website asking just that, and the response was along the lines of:
I'm really curious if any of the WordStar-diehards have tried a text editor like vim or emacs.
I seem to remember a comment on Robert Sawyer's website asking just that, and the response was along the lines of:
- Wordstar still works;
- Anything else uses different keys;
- How do you word count/print/export in a word processing format from those text editors?
Sysadmins, I'd expect this from. Authors, I would not.
Never underestimate the sheer quantity of tinkering an author will do in order to avoid having to tinker with their writing environment.
posted by majick at 11:12 AM on August 7 [3 favorites]
Never underestimate the sheer quantity of tinkering an author will do in order to avoid having to tinker with their writing environment.
posted by majick at 11:12 AM on August 7 [3 favorites]
« Older This story has it all | Women in Japan fight for the right to... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Consider: On a long-hand page, you can jump back and forth in your document with ease. You can put in bookmarks, either actual paper ones, or just fingers slipped into the middle of the manuscript stack. You can annotate the manuscript for yourself with comments like "Fix this!" or "Don't forget to check these facts" without there being any possibility of you missing them when you next work on the document. And you can mark a block, either by circling it with your pen, or by physically cutting it out, without necessarily having to do anything with it right away. The entire document is your workspace.
thank you
posted by HearHere at 11:24 AM on August 6 [5 favorites]