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Wordstar was good stuff! Between Wordstar and MultiWrite we sold hundreds of Kaypro machines bundled with loud as hell daisy wheel printers to my fellow colleg

Wordstar was good stuff! Between Wordstar and MultiWrite we sold hundreds of Kaypro machines bundled with loud as hell daisy wheel printers to my fellow college classmates. Unless they lived alone almost everyone returned a day or two later for the sound proofed printer enclosure. Why daisy wheel printers? At the time our professors refused to take dot matrix printouts for class assignments or papers; it took a couple of years for Epson's higher print density heads to appear and produce "good enough" output. More amusingly - WordStar inspired a slew of -star knockoffs including one for farm management called DirtStar. Urban Dictionary has a very different definition for that word today. At least when I was selling personal computers out of a MicroAge what slowly strangled WordStar sales was IBM DisplayWrite and Word Perfect both of which served the legal community much better. Microsoft Word and Apple's MacWrite didn't help either. And to a much lesser degree IBM's choice of swapping the control and shift keys made WordStar's navigation unnatural. You either had to adapt or order a special keyboard with CTRL back where it belonged. I've never forgiven them for that change. (Damn you, IBM! :shakes fist:)

chiph 10y ago
I had to suffer through DisplayWrite at one job. What a horror. Word Perfect was .. nearly perfect. If only they had made the transition to Windows faster/better they'd still be a major force in the market.
- technofiend 10y ago
  DisplayWrite had a lot of traction because of IBM systems that came before it. The idea of running it on an IBM PC and later a clone was very appealing to people leasing IBM gear. I guess it's all relative. Word Perfect's tutorials were so good my non-computer-literate wife taught herself to use it in the space of a couple of days. It was pretty darn good.

chiph 10y ago

I had to suffer through DisplayWrite at one job. What a horror. Word Perfect was .. nearly perfect. If only they had made the transition to Windows faster/better they'd still be a major force in the market.

technofiend 10y ago
DisplayWrite had a lot of traction because of IBM systems that came before it. The idea of running it on an IBM PC and later a clone was very appealing to people leasing IBM gear. I guess it's all relative. Word Perfect's tutorials were so good my non-computer-literate wife taught herself to use it in the space of a couple of days. It was pretty darn good.