I learnt it in high school on a counterfeit Apple ][ with an 80-column display card. (Maybe it ran CP/M? My memory is hazy.) I had to type up the school's Prize

I learnt it in high school on a counterfeit Apple ][ with an 80-column display card. (Maybe it ran CP/M? My memory is hazy.) I had to type up the school's Prize-Giving Day program. When I got to college (late 1980s) and got my first programming job on campus, I copped a grad student's .emacs file which made Emacs behave like WordStar. I used it all the way through to my postdoc, modifying the necessary major modes to not conflict with WS bindings. I ran into the author of that .emacs file, but he had moved on to Jove, by then. The upside of using WordStar bindings was that, as a de facto sysadmin in various academic departments and labs, I could never answer peoples' questions about Emacs. A more complete history is here: http://www.wordstar.org/index.php/wordstar-history http://www.wordstar.org/index.php/wordstar-history