'Logical, beautiful, perfect' WordStar rises again

https://www.zdnet.com/article/logical-beautiful-perfect-wordstar-rises-again-how-you-can-type-faster-with-this-old-tech/

by CrankyBear • 2 years ago

21 6 2 years ago

zdnet.com

jmclnx• 2 years ago

I wonder how close JOE is to WordStar, which I never used. It comes with Slackware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe's_Own_Editor

glebd• 2 years ago

Pretty close if you start it with `jstar` instead of `joe`

tivert• 2 years ago

There was no proper archive of WordStar for DOS 7.0 available online, so I decided to create one.

I wonder if someone could leak the source code. Googling the original developers listed on the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar) turns up some LinkedIn profiles (which I did not log in to check). I think I've read several stories of old source code getting recovered from a 3.5 floppy someone had in a garage somewhere. There's even a video where the LGR guy scavenged an old PC from a defunct warehouse-like computer repair shop and was able to pull source code from some old game from Sierra Online from it (it was a development machine, and they brought it in for repair in the 80s and never claimed it).

jklowden• 2 years ago

Oh, please. Wordstar is nothing but an insignificant pre-GUI editor with roughly zero useful modern printer drivers.

For a comparable but better experience, choose any text editor — emacs, for example — and groff. You get the control-keys of your choice (wordstar should you so choose) and world class typesetting capable of anything, including books.

flembat• 2 years ago

I remember that my Dad wrote himself a clone of at least the wordstar functions that he used, he called it starword and ran it on his BBC micro.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41169195

'Logical, beautiful, perfect' WordStar rises again

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