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:
July 30th, 2024 at 6:40 pm
I was someone who used Wordstar back in the day, but have you looked at Vim? With a few plugins it works very well, and very keyboard oriented.
It’s now my go to for writing, along with Obsidian.
July 30th, 2024 at 7:20 pm
Vim certainly is a fine text editor, but as it says right on the Vim website, “Vim isn’t a word processor. Although it can display text with various forms of highlighting and formatting, it isn’t there to provide WYSIWYG editing of typeset documents.”
August 1st, 2024 at 10:06 am
Thank you for this monumental effort!
I know it isn’t exactly WS7, but WordTsar is a cross -platform clone that’s getting better all the time: http://wordtsar.ca/
August 1st, 2024 at 11:04 am
Yes, indeed! WordTsar‘s author, Gerald Brandt, is a dear friend of mine, as well as being a fellow science-fiction writer. I mention WordTsar in my WordStar 7.0 archive’s -README file and provide a link to it: http://wordtsar.ca/
August 1st, 2024 at 2:35 pm
WS 7.0D still in use here! (Used it in 1970 to create the book I wrote (later doctoral dissertation) noted on my website. Everything on my site also created in Wordstar, though for heavy graphics I put the WS text into Quark as my DTP program.
I’ve saved the code from the 3.5″ floppies on all my PCs, but the manuals will be handy to have in digital form. Thanks for that! I still have the hard copies.
I discovered after years of using WS that my Harvard classmate Rob Barnaby was the coder, in assembly language which is one reason it is so fast.
Lately I brought up a Win7 64 bit machine which will not run WS so I tried WordTsar but It fails to load with error message
The procedure entrypoint CreateDXGIFactory2 could not be located
in the dynamic link library dxgi.dll.
Gerald has suggested loading a different WT version. Before I begin floundering around deeper with his suggestion, I’d welcome any thoughts from other WS and WT fans.
Last year I also met a coder at an OS/2 conference who also uses WS.
August 1st, 2024 at 3:52 pm
I envy you for having met Rob Barnaby! I’ve met Seymour Rubinstein, but never Rob. (And I was friends with Peter Mierau, who wrote the NewStar codebase that was purchased by WSI to become WordStar 4.)
August 6th, 2024 at 8:29 am
The screenshot on El Reg of the old WordStar interface brings back memories. There’s too much GUI in everything nowadays, so I use TextEdit (yes, yes, I know) but I’m tempted to fire up WordStar 7 and WordPerfect 5.0 just to recapture that distraction-free, responsive mode of working. Thank you for making this available!
August 6th, 2024 at 9:53 am
I was fascinated to read Sawyer’s article on why he loves Wordstar rather than its DOS rivals. He makes a fine case for Wordstar as the leading DOS word processor.
But Windows (and MacOS and Linux) give us point and click. The P & C approach is so much more flexible than touch-typing, and has obvious advantages for the thump and dump typist (me).
August 6th, 2024 at 10:04 am
But the point, Michael, is that WordStar has all of that — complete mouse point-and-click support — in addition to its wonderful touch-typist’s interface. It is 100% fully CUA-compliant (with fully mousable pulldown menus and dialog boxes following industry-standard guidelines). In fact, since Microsoft and others have drifted away from actually adhering to industry standards (God save us from the Ribbon!), WordStar for DOS is the most CUA-compliant wordprocessor you will find:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access