[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

Was that that idiotic editor that set 8th bit randomly for the ASCII letters and escaped each non-ASCII character separately?

Earlier versions before Wordstar 2000 didn't do non-Ascii at all. Wordstar was only 7 bit ASCII (enough for a golf ball or daisywheel) thus used the eighth bit of the last letter or non-printing 7 bit code as an internal code. I wrote a Pearl script to convert the old files pre-W2000 files to 7 bit ASCII.
I think a golfball or daisywheel could do at most 96 characters, and like a typewriter Wordstar had non-destructive backspace so you could badly overprint diacritics from standard punctuation or currency symbols other than $ by over print of - or =

The Selectric III featured a 96-character element vs. the previous 88-character element. IBM's series of "Electronic Typewriters" used this same 96-character element. The 96-character elements can be identified by yellow printing on the top plastic surface and the legend "96", which always appears along with the font name and pitch. The 96- and 88-character elements are mechanically incompatible with each other (they won't fit on each other's machines) and 96-character elements were not available in as many fonts as the older 88-character types [launched in 1961].

—Wikipedia
Early computer printers that did letter quality were based on Selectric typewriter.

Daisy wheel printing is an impact printing technology invented in 1970 by Andrew Gabor[1] at Diablo Data Systems. It uses interchangeable pre-formed type elements, each with typically 96 glyphs, to generate high-quality output comparable to premium typewriters such as the IBM Selectric, but two to three times faster. Daisy wheel printing was used in electronic typewriters, word processors and computers from 1972. The daisy wheel is so named because of its resemblance to the daisy flower.

also

In 1889 Arthur Irving Jacobs patented a daisy wheel design (U.S. Patent 409,289) that was used on the Victor index typewriter.

A. H. Reiber of Teletype Corporation received U.S. Patent 2,146,380 in 1939 for a daisy wheel printer.

Teletypes and later line printers (long metal band with embossed print) and latest of all, DotMatrix (even before IBM PC launched) were not suitable for correspondence (Letters).

Thimble printers are closely related to daisy wheel printers, but instead of a flat wheel the petals were bent to form a cup-shaped "thimble" print element. Introduced by NEC in 1977 as their "Spinwriter" series, the replaceable thimbles each held 128 characters.

Wordstar was released in 1978, but the NEC thimble based printer was rare, so it only did 7 bit ASCII text output. Also some serial and parallel ports were only 7 bits. Email (which did exist then) was only 7 bits. It used 8 bit per byte files as all CP/M systems supported that!

The IBM PC wasn't in the UK till 1981 and they chose DOS and 8088 because it wasn't a real 16 bit CPU, the big catalogue of CP/M 80 software (8080 code) could be be translated (the binary!) by an Intel tool to 8088/8086 as it was 64K segments and a superset of instructions. MS bought in DOS from a company that reverse engineered it from CP/M 86 (All three OSes used the same system calls). Earlier versions of DOS (MS or IBM PC-DOs) had no subdirectories. When they were added (Ver 2.1x?) the path separator was the opposite slash to UNIX (public in 1973) and the UNIX (also Internet later) / was for "switch" options on commands.
If you set switchchar=- then paths used / instead of \ and options used - instead of /, just like UNIX.
That was removed in a later MS-DOS.

There are loads of better text editors/wordprocessors for DOS, or modern OS consoles.
Also the most important thing in a Wordprocessor is paragraph styles that are separate from the text. Wordstar was fine for writing letters on golfball or daisywheel printers. Madness for multilingual or any more complicated document. Wordperfect was a bit better. MS Word for DOS was a different philosophy. Wordperfect for Windows was poor. Windows MS Word and Excel were a completely different philosphy from all the leading DOS "wordprocessors" and was first on the Mac! The MS Word 2.0 was the first MS Windows version and Windows only just usable at 3.0 (3.1 and 3.11 quite good), all the earlier Windows were junk.
Not sure why MS did MS Works, as it was really poor compared to MS Office.

Also CP/M and DOS at first had only entry of characters visible on the keyboard.
No ` ¬ | ~ £ on many, but would have had ' ~ # $ ^ % & * @ and ¦
Some had no { or }, but < > [ ] ( )./ No ß ç £ etc except on certain national specific keyboards. The characters might be some other character on screen (code pages were later on DOS). You could only print what was on the print head. Initally dotmatrix was only low quality for spreadsheets. Visicalc was the main reason for Commerical Apple II sales and Supercalc for CP/M sales. Lotus 123 and Wordprefect were a late comers. IBM only did the PC because the market already existed and was a poor spec so as to not hurt their minicomputer sales.