[Quoth]

I used Wordstar on CP/M before there was an IBM PC in the UK or Ireland. An Apple II with a Z80 card, 80 column card and replacement keyboard with added 2 x 1M byte 8" floppy drives. The Apple II text and keyboard was primitive and floppy 100K and slow.

Later I used and sold NewWord, a Wordstar clone, on CP/M (Amstrad PCW) and MS-DOS.

Then in early 1990s I wrote a text editor for DOS in Modula-2 that used Wordstar keys and Menu/Mouse and worked OK on NT and Win 3.x. It also had hyperlinking so a document could be an outline and each chapter in a separate file. It wasn't constrained by RAM as the part in RAM was only a window of the file, It also had a foot pedals (buttons on joystick port) and used the sound card to play audio dictation which could be copied in to HDD at twice speed, if the dictation cassette/microcassette was recorded at half speed. It had no formatting at all. You optionally used markup recognised by DTP or Word or Sun Office. Like a better version of Notepad, but limited only by disk space. Non-NT Notepad (Win2, 3.x. Win9x etc) could only edit 64 K or less files.

Ten years+ later I was using notepad++ for capturing writing and MS Word 2002/XP to edit.

My last "Wordstar" foray two years ago was a Joyce Emulator on Linux (available on Windows) and reading 3" and 3.5" CP/M floppies (simple adaptor for 3" drive) on my last PC with a real floppy port. I copied the Amstrad PCW CP/M files (Newword, but like older wordstar) and then wrote a Perl script to convert to ASCII as the original WS use the 8th bit to mark word and line breaks etc.

I did write a novel on Wordstar and a History of Computers & Communications.

It was good in its day for business correspondence, mail merge and a draft of a novel.