OMG! I totally forgot about the Zip drive!! Thanks for making me feel like I'm so old that I'm forgetting things.... :rofl:

I just sent a Zip drive to the tip...

I made it a point to avoid WordStar in my career (which pre-dates it).

And I succeeded!

I always viewed as one of those programs that becomes popular for no apparent reason, and then stays popular because no one wants to change.

It became popular back in the days of CP/M, and by having it's key bindings adopted by other tools like Sidekick and the Turbo Pascal IDE.

Wordstar DOS (I started at WS 3.0) the original with dot command markup?
or the later
Windows versions?

All the early DOS stuff ran on 8080 processors with up to 640K RAM

IIRC the big players were

Word Processing: Word, Wordperfect, Wordstar
Spreadsheet: 123, Supercalc, Multiplan, Quattro
RDatabase: dBase, Paradox, (RBase? brain fade :o )

@theducks You forgot Visicalc - AFAIK it was first spreadsheet - an Apple II killer app, but for Viscalc there might not be an Apple.

And Multimate Word processor - an IBM PC killer app that killed the Wang WP system, it wasn't much known outside of large corporations - Conn Life commissioned its development. I recall some C programmers using it as an editor - the alternative was EDLIN :lol:

Can't remember if it was William Safire or William F. Buckley who used Wordstar up until the day they died - might have been both. I miss them - not that I always agreed with them, but they could turn a phrase or two and raise a wry smile; most of today's equivalents can only beget groans of despair... so many words, so little said :cry:

BR

Oh, DOS, of course!

It is a brilliant program, never matched in all the years since. It is in effect a third keyboard level, so that one has lower case, caps, and editing commands, all without looking at the keyboard or moving one's hand off the home keys. I went from 42 wpm on a manual typewriter to 100 wpm on an Olympic electronic typewriter with a CPM computer extension running what I suppose was WS 3.

Mike Petrie has created a WordStar command set for Word that makes the clunky Microsoft software function well, though not perfectly. (One must switch to Alt-A to Mark All, for example.) I usually finish up manuscripts on Word, because that's how editors expect to receive them.

I have successfully punted WordStar (it's 7D, the last release) through all successive Windows machines, down to Win 7 32-bit. It still works perfectly though I have lost the ability to copy from WS to Clipboard (I can go the other way), so in the rare case where I must do this, I open the WS file in Notepad. I also can no longer print from WS, though most afficionados have built a workaround use Ghostscript for that purpose.

IMHO the introduction of WordStar made the whole computer revolution worthwhile, even if it had never led to nothing else. I cannot imagine doing without it.

I second everything Toxaris said about his plugin, it is absolutely glorious, and can make clean/barebones HTML out of any sort of messy DOC(X)s you might get your hands on.

• Word -> Google Docs (add in comments, make edits, etc. etc.) -> Word? No problem.
• Finereader DOC(X) mess -> Word? No problem.
• Horrible abomination edited over the years by multiple people using completely different versions of Word? No problem.
• Someone copied/pasted quotes from different websites into Word, and then "fixed" them so they "look perfectly fine" on the surface? No problem.

Posted by Notjohn using Netscape. :rofl:

I guess you're still driving a Model T Ford too? :-)