Subj : Wordstar 7.0 Archive
To   : Ben Collver
From : halian
Date : Sun Aug 04 2024 20:16:32

 BC> My name is Robert J. Sawyer. I'm a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Canadian
 BC> science-fiction writer. All twenty-five of my novels were written with
 BC> WordStar, the best word-processing program the world has ever known.
 BC> 
 BC> <https://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm>
 BC> 
 BC> WordStar was first introduced in 1978 and the final release--WordStar for
 BC> DOS 7.0 Rev. D--came out in December 1992. The program has never been
 BC> updated since, and the company that made it has been defunct for decades;
 BC> the program is abandonware.
 BC> 
 BC> But I still use it, and George R.R. Martin uses an earlier version. There
 BC> has never--until now--been a complete online archive of the final version
 BC> of the program along with all its manuals. Here it is:
 BC> 
 BC> Click to download the complete WordStar 7.0 archive
 BC> 
 BC> <https://sfwriter.com/sawyer-wordstar-7-archive.zip>
 BC> 
 BC> I spent weeks putting all this together. The archive contains not just the
 BC> WordStar program but also extensive resources on how to use it, in additio
 BC> to fully text-searchable PDFs of the original manuals, totaling over 1,000
 BC> pages, scanned from my own copies.
 BC> 
 BC> Since MS-DOS programs, such as WordStar, can't run under modern operating
 BC> systems without using an MS-DOS emulator, I've provided two complete
 BC> plug-and-play packages for running WordStar under Windows, one using
 BC> DOSBox-X, an emulator that's still actively developed and maintained, and
 BC> another using vDosPlus, which still works wonderfully but is no longer
 BC> maintained.

I regret that, having been but an egg cell when WordStar ceased development, I've never given it a try, but I can still respect the allure of distraction-free and command-line word processors; when my family first moved to Florida, my mom took up a job doing medical transcription, which initially involved WordPerfect 5.0 and (the part I don't miss) a dot-matrix printer.

I appreciate the effort that you've put into making just-add-water packages for WordStar, and will give it a try sometime in the near future... ADHD permitting. :D Doubly so because I tend to fall down umpteen rabbit holes while researching things for my worldbuilding.

                                                                      -̹ƒlian 

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