Robert J. Sawyer

Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer

Archive for the 'WordStar' Category

vDosPlus: 21st Century DOS!

Saturday, September 24th, 2016

WordPerfect (Edward Mendelson), and the whole XyWrite mailing-list community to give us a wonderful, stable platform for running our old workhorse software under Windows XP through 10, both 32-bit and 64-bit. Up to today, I’ve run WordStar mostly under TameDOS, not vDos (or vDosPlus), and exclusively on 32-bit machines; my interest in vDos and vDosPlus […]

Running WordStar under Windows

Thursday, October 30th, 2014

My favorite word-processing program is the versatlie, customizable, and powerful WordStar for DOS, last updated in 1992. Running it under Microsoft Windows can be difficult, particularly with 64-bit versions of Windows, and especially with recent versions (Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1). But a free new MS-DOS emulator called vDos makes it easy […]

30 years of using WordStar; Canadian SF 30 years ago

Monday, December 16th, 2013

NOTE: For information on using WordStar with modern computers under Windows, see my instructions here. Thirty years ago today, on Friday, December 16, 1983, I started learning the word-processing program WordStar. I’d bought my first computer, an Osborne 1 CP/M luggable (24 pounds, the most portable computer in the world back then — see picture […]

Happy Anniversary, SmartKey!

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

Today is the 20th anniversary file-stamp date of the DOS TSR keyboard-macro program I use: SmartKey 6.0g Advanced, created by Australia’s FBN Software — an absolutely amazing program that I rely on daily. (I use WordStar for DOS, which is great on its own, but the combination of it with SmartKey has let me customize […]

RJS on WordStar cited in paper about accessibility for the blind

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Stumbled on this quite by accident, and found it an interesting coincidence, given that my current novel, Wake, deals with a blind teenager trying to deal with computers: a January 2006 technical paper entitled “A Personal Information Management Approach for People With Low Vision or Blindness” by Silas S. Brown and Peter Robinson of University […]

WordStar: an oldie but a goodie!

Friday, December 21st, 2007

I still write with WordStar for DOS, and I note that today marks the 15th anniversary of the file-stamp date on the last version ever released: WordStar for DOS 7.0 Revision D was finalized December 21, 1992. I’ve customized the hell out of WordStar over the years, and love it. It’s fast, rock-solid, wonderfully optimized […]

WordStar connections

Saturday, December 31st, 2005

To my absolute delight, I got an email this week from Seymour Rubinstein. He was the founder of software maker MicroPro International, and co-creator (with Rob Barnaby) of WordStar, the great old wordprocessing program (originally for the CP/M operating system, and later for MS-DOS). To this day, I still use WordStar for DOS 7.0, Revision […]