This program was fantastic, given the limitations of the computers at the time. WordStar ran well on a 4 MHz Z80 computer with 64K bytes of memo

This program was fantastic, given the limitations of the computers at the time. WordStar ran well on a 4 MHz Z80 computer with 64K bytes of memory. Go ahead, read that sentence again! WordStar would try to update its (sort of WYSIWYG) screen display while you were typing, but it would often lag. That was because many computers were connected not to an internal video display card, but to an external terminal via an RS-232 serial interface running at 19,200 baud (1,920 characters per second). Fortunately the display output was as ASCII characters, not bitmapped, so that lessened the processing requirements quite a bit. Whenever WordStar detected that its screen rendering was lagging behind the input typing, it would very cleverly "skip ahead" in the rendering. The result was that the computer felt quite responsive at all times.