WordStar for DOS 7.0 Archive
by Rob - July 30th, 2024.Filed under: Uncategorized.
As you all know, I continue to use WordStar for DOS 7.0 as my word-processing program. It was last updated in December 1992, and the company that made it has been defunct for decades; the program is abandonware.
There was no proper archive of WordStar for DOS 7.0 available online, so I decided to create one. I’ve put weeks of work into this. Included are not only full installs of the program (as well as images of the installation disks), but also plug-and-play solutions for running WordStar for DOS 7.0 under Windows, and also complete full-text-searchable PDF versions of all seven manuals that came with WordStar — over a thousand pages of documentation.
I’ve also included lots of my own explanations on how to use and customize WordStar, many WordStar-related utility programs, and numerous other goodies.
Carolyn Clink kindly did the scanning of the manuals. When she was done, I said to her, “Countless WordStar users will thank you.” She replied, “Oh, I think I can count them.” ;)
And it’s true that the WordStar die-hard community is pretty small these days (George R.R. Martin still uses the even-older WordStar 4.0). But the program has been a big part of my career — not only did I write all 25 of my novels and almost all of my short stories with it (a few date back to the typewriter era), I also in my earlier freelance days wrote hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles with WordStar.
I wanted there to be a monument to this, the finest word-processing program ever created. As Anne Rice said, “WordStar was magnificent. I loved it. It was logical, beautiful, perfect. Compared to it, Microsoft Word is pure madness.”
And, I suppose I’m thinking a bit about my legacy, too. Once I’m gone, my literary estate will need to deal with my electronic manuscripts, and my executor should be able to work with them on her own computer rather than just mine. Also, there are countless other writers who are no longer with us who wrote with WordStar, including Arthur C. Clarke; I hope this archive I’ve created will be of use to scholars.
Anyone can have WordStar for DOS 7.0 up and running on a Windows computer in a matter of minutes using this archive; with just a little bit more work, WordStar for DOS 7.0 also runs just fine under Linux and Mac OS.
Here’s the link to the full 680-megabyte archive:
November 10th, 2024 at 5:16 pm
Back in the late 80’s my dad had an IBM PC 5150. He used WordStar a lot to edit text files. I saw some of the things he was doing with WordStar using the control key+letter key combination. The most impressive of those features was the ability to highlight text and either copy or move it somewhere else in the document. I used it myself for various text files. Since it could save ascii files it proved to be a great editor for doing assembly language programming. My dad also had the Masm assembler. I found a book at the library on X86 assembly language programming and used it to fool around with Masm. One of the program listings had a typo and wouldn’t work. I figured out where the typo was and fixed it. I had to do the same thing years later in the 90’s when I was playing around with Motorola 6809 assembly programs.
By the mid 90’s I learned about Linux and subsequently the Joe editor. I realized that Joe was a clone of WordStar. Joe doesn’t support the function keys, have directory listing capabilities, and lacks the ruler. It does have the pop up help screen and it supports the control keys. So the basic WordStar editing capabilities are all there in Joe. Joe being a Linux editor has some capabilities that go beyond what WordStar was capable of doing. There is an old Joe editor for Dos available ver. 2.2. It only supports the basic WordStar editing capabilities and leaves out the more advanced Linux capabilities. The author of Joe, Joseph Allen, was trying to get the advanced Linux stuff to work in Dos but wasn’t successful. I suspect he would have had to put a virtual machine in the editor to pull it off. The Linux verion of Joe is capable of running a shell inside the editor. And after you exit the shell edit the shell session as a text file. He was trying to get the Dos version of Joe to do that. Joe also has different modes of operation that depends on the name of the Joe binary. The Dos version supports this. Basically it lets Joe emulate the keystrokes of other editors and WordStar was one of them. Over the years I have used WordStar every now and then in various Dos emulators and virtual machines running Dos. Joe is the editor I use the most now even in Dos.
November 20th, 2024 at 3:12 pm
My WS use started with a version 3.? – it was used heavily. Some years later I noticed the 6.0-version at a low price and bought it. The central MS-DOS files + WS including a laser printer driver were also installed on a 1.44 3½ disk. Full or overfull? No, more than half the disk area was free and available for texts produced!
November 23rd, 2024 at 7:57 am
This is amazing and has made me attempt a wordstar like mode for emacs/org nerds. It’s not quite the same of course but if you’re already addicted to emacs org mode you might find it useful:
https://github.com/shawnh-git/orgstar-mode/
Also there is another dosbox version I had more luck with in linux called ‘dosbox-staging’ which is especially nice because you can use it without flathub if you have limited space.
December 20th, 2024 at 7:01 pm
Hello Robert,
since I’m currently thinking back to the 1980s and 1990s anyway – while I’m trying to get my old BBS (X-File BBS) up and running again and science fiction also plays a role in this – I’m currently experimenting with various applications under DOS. I came across WordStar, which I am currently trying out in a virtual machine under FreeDOS.
I find your efforts to maintain WordStar extremely admirable. It feels like a small homage to the software that made so much possible for you back then, doesn’t it? By the way, my BBS ran under PTS-DOS, a Russian DOS that was also written in assembler. Like WordStar, it was impressively fast.
After an hour of intensive work with WordStar, I have to say: the functions are really brilliant! It could well be that I’m becoming a WordStar fan here. :)
I wonder if the source code of WS is available somewhere?
I wish you and your loved ones a peaceful Christmas and a Happy New Year 2025.
Best wishes from Germany
Jürgen
March 8th, 2025 at 8:26 am
@DL9AI: Thanks for the useful workaround for Linux. I recently switched to Linux (again) and getting this file error message gave me a few sleepless nights. Your proposed change to the config file worked!
October 11th, 2025 at 11:17 am
In my WordStar for DOS 7.0 archive, I include both SWAP.COM and IBMFIX.COM, which work under vDosPlus and DOSBox-X. https://sfwriter.com/ws7.htm