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WordStar: Arrogant, Difficult, Powerful (2022)
- chasil 3y agoI actually have a bound set for WordStar 4. If you want to use something similar on modern systems, try "Joe's Own Editor." https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/ https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/
- toast0 3y agoFWIW, Joseph Allen comments on here from time to time https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jhallenworld https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jhallenworld Personally, I've been using joe since one of my IRC buddies told me about it in ~1996 or something, and it's served me well since. Much love to Joe and the rest of the contributors. The only serious issue I've had with joe was when a boss was snooping around in my home directory and was perturbed by all the DEADJOE files, since his name was also Joe. :)
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoWonderful! I used to use joe on my 486-50 running Linux way back in like, 94? Many university papers, and a lot of cringe poetry, too.
- wkat4242 3y agoI never liked all the temp files Joe littered. In the end nano became more popular and even though it's not WordStar compatible it didn't matter to me anymore since the days of DOS were long gone :)
- nullc 3y agoBig joe fan here. When I started using Linux full time I was already well familiar with wordstar, so it was a natural tool. It's a decent editor in its own right, and not just because it has a familiar set of keybindings. I've only encountered relatively few other users.
- gerdesj 3y agoI've used joe since the late '90s. First job on install is to remove the space in front of "-nobackups" in /etc/joe/joerc. I have to remember when using nano not to exit with ctrl-k, x or else end up losing a random line 8)
- toast0 3y ago> I've only encountered relatively few other users. When my employer was acquired by Facebook, I joined the FB employee Joe user group, and it became the Joe users group. When I left, it went back to the Joe user group :/ I gather joe was fairly popular at some point, but as long as it keeps working, I'm going to keep using it.
- copperx 3y agoWhat does bound set mean? Memorized keybindings?
- bombcar 3y agoI took it to be a bound manual (software used to come in massive boxes with HUGE manuals).
- wkat4242 3y agoThis was actually a good thing imo. Software was really well documented. These days it's an afterthought. When you ordered an upgrade disk it would come with replacement sections of the manual too to cover the new features.
- bombcar 3y agoI loved the ring binder manuals even though they were harder to read (but great to refer to as they'd open flat) and updates would say "replace page 6 with this, add page 10-A between 10 and 11", etc.
- shiroiuma 3y agoYes, documentation (for just about anything) is one thing I really miss from the last millennium.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y agoI wonder if the lack of documentation is due to software being easier to write because of high-level languages.
- toast0 3y agoIMHO, software documentation has dropped because it's hard to write the documentation when the software isn't finished, and software isn't finished anymore. Games (and other software) used to come with a large manual, and then a single folded sheet that had quick start instructions and updates to the manual. The large manual had to be finalizes before the disk images, in order to get them made on time... but the software had to be firmed up. Now, it's very common to have a huge day one patch, which could change a tremendous amount of things. You can't print a manual that addresses that, and nobody wants to retain writing staff to do constant updates.
- zwieback 3y agowas there really a 6502 version? I ran Wordstar on my CP/M Z80 card on the Apple 2
- falsedang 3y ago[flagged]
- fsckboy 3y agohow did the Z80 cards work interfacing with the Apple hardware? I presume CP/M software loaded onto the Z80 was accessing (what I will call) "S-100 memory and displays"? Did you run a piece of software on the 6502 that translated/transported that virtual hardware state on the Z80 card to the real Apple hardware? Or did the Z80 card translate the available Apple hardware memory and display to be directly accessible to the Z80, and put the 6502 to sleep? The mind boggles. Hardware was much simpler back then, seems like anything could be possible, but memory was expensive so you wouldn't want to duplicate it or waste it. I once heard from a reliable source that Paul Allen's Z80 card was Microsoft's big cash cow funding Microsoft's growth in between the BASIC era and the MS-DOS era, it was a really important product.
- bombcar 3y agohttps://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2055/how-did-the-apple-ii-forward-binary-instructions-to-the-z80-software-card-with-c https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2055/how-... has some background on it, and it was a huge success for Microsoft.
- js2 3y ago> Can you imagine in the 1990s plugging a Motorola 68020 card into a Intel 286 PC and running Mac programs? There was an Apple II peripheral card for the IBM PC: https://www.diskman.com/presents/trackstar/ https://www.diskman.com/presents/trackstar/ > (Or vice versa - plugging an Intel card into a Mac and running Windows programs on the hardware.) The PC Transporter was a peripheral card for the II GS. There was also an Apple IIe card for the Mac LC I think.
- pelagicAustral 3y agoWordStar was the first application I used. Way back, in 1993 on Windows 3.11... hahaha I remember trying to draw things with ASCII before I knew that was a thing. I was only allowed to use WordStar and play Sokoban back then... I distinctively recall knowing there and then that all I wanted to do "when i grow up" was going to be something computer related. Good memories.
- anthk 3y agoYou lucky. When I was in Elementary we played a math puzzle and maybe Pacman. Pacman was cool, but, you know, it was the same level over and over. Sokoban at least has some variety.
- browningstreet 3y agoIt used to be a WordStar vs WordPerfect world. Team WordStar on Osborne 1 here.
- postmodest 3y agoWordPerfect on IBM AT, checking in.
- markphip 3y agoI used XyWrite thru HS and College until eventually switching to Word for Windows. I think I did one paper on WordPerfect on the schools PS2.
- ngcc_hk 3y agoI am the one doing word processing software for my firm. Secretaries and typist like multimate more due to Wang heritage. The frightening scene of nothingness of wordperfect is … Word is a mac software as Microsoft is mainly an application software firm for mac and basic I suspect. Never evaluated that. As far as I remember the key combination of wordstar, the slowness of it due to I always found its keyboard mapping hard and with menu not enough space and even slower. Never a fan. I wonder how vim would work as a writer tool vs wordstar.
- jfengel 3y agoOsborne 1 was amazing. $1,795 bought you a portable computer and office suite software. It was a lot of computer for the time.
- glitchc 3y agoI prefer Word Perfect 6 personally. Awesome text editor, very flexible.
- zabzonk 3y agobut ... those horrible function keys!
- mixmastamyk 3y agoYou could get an overlay to show what they all did. Not bad with that though I preferred CUA once it came out.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoI'm fairly sure I still have one of those WordPerfect function key templates floating around somewhere.
- wkat4242 3y agoI only know the imsai from wargames. Never actually saw one in real life :'(
- AA-BA-94-2A-56 3y agoGRRM writes using WordStar: https://www.daskeyboard.com/blog/how-george-r-r-martin-writes-on-an-old-school-dos-computer/ https://www.daskeyboard.com/blog/how-george-r-r-martin-write...
- kstrauser 3y agoI would’ve found that more impressive a decade ago.
- k_roy 3y agoand this is probably the reason anybody even remembers it. Because when he actually WAS writing, you had a whole new generation of up-and-coming writers listening to him wax poetic about the great WordStar
- coldtea 3y agoAnybody in the mainstream average user world. For in the tech world, tons of people who used computers in the 80s and 90s remember WordStar regardless of Martin, there are blogs, cloning attempts, etc. Just like there are fans of WordPerfect, the Atari, Amiga, and others.
- k_roy 3y agoand there are TENS of us!! Just saying. Him waxing poetic about it during a time when the watercooler topic was what happened last night on GoT is the reason that anybody else even recognizes the name.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoHere is another editor I keep around from the WordStar era. It's relatively small, highly portable and compiles quickly. Steep learning curve. https://github.com/johnsonjh/g/ https://github.com/johnsonjh/g/
- js2 3y agoMy Apple II had a Microsoft CP/M card[1] in it just so we could run WordStar. I think I was the only kid in sixth grade turning in papers written on a word processor. After AppleWorks[2] was released in 1984, I don't think I ever booted into CP/M again. For some reason, I never used Apple Writer[3] even though it was released in 1979 and apparently a decent word processor. Decent enough for Paul Lutus[4] to retire and sail around the world anyway[5]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer 4. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lutusp https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lutusp 5. https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/index.html https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/index.html
- flenserboy 3y agoAppleWriter was interesting as it had its own built-in language, WPL, a macro language that could do a chunk more (https://archive.org/details/wpl-manual/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/wpl-manual/mode/2up). That was not the sort of feature expected given the inherent limitations of an 8-bit machine.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y agoI believe all of that came later and not in the original releases?
- apricot 3y agoYes, WPL was the most amazing feature of Apple Writer. It reminded me of programming a scientific calculator, but with text rather than numbers. When AppleWorks came out, I was really disappointed that it didn't include anything like it (this was alleviated a few years later with 3rd party macro packages). The first program I sold for actual money, back when I was in high school, was a set of WPL programs that allowed teachers to generate exams by picking multiple-choice questions at random from a master file. The answers were also randomly permuted. It also produced the answer key for each. The idea was that teachers would use it to generate exams where each student's version would be different. I sold a grand total of two copies. A marketing genius, I was not.
- ataylor284_ 3y agoI never used WordStar itself, but the integrated editor in Turbo Pascal used the same key bindings. I haven't used anything related in many years but I'll never forget ^kb and ^kk for marking blocks.
- wilsynet 3y agoI used PFS:Write on the Apple II. Then later WordPerfect 5.1 on the PC. When I was a kid, a university student who couldn’t type paid me to transcribe his essays.
- gespadas 3y agoOh! I used WordStar a LONG time ago (1992-1993, as far I remember), before WordPerfect.
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- eichin 3y agoMmm, the screenshots bring back memories... a place I worked in the early 80s (right around when you could still look at the IBM PC and plausibly predict that even with all of IBM behind it, it just wasn't going to work out, it got so many things wrong, and was so slow compared to older hardware... no really, we believed that) we did a lot of ludicrous things with an IMSAI. One of them was WordStar split-screen mode - you could open a second file - read-only - on the upper part of the screen, scroll through it with a subset of wordstar keys, and hit something to swap back and forth (I forget what, we had serial terminals with a lot of function keys back then, and brightly colored wordstar labels for them.) The trick was that wordstar had a documented hook for "custom" display drivers and keyboard drivers... so we could easily lie to wordstar that the screen was shorter, and edit the cursor movement sequences to all have an offset, so it would draw on the lower 2/3 of the screen and we had the upper 1/3 for our shenanigans. This was a couple of years before I first used emacs. (Also, I am sort of amazed that we got paid to do it - very cheap highschool student interns basically, so there were a lot of outright anti-economic aspects of the whole thing. Loads of fun though :-)
- Communitivity 3y agoMy dad was a professional writer who wrote for everyone from Time Life Books to the National Enquirer. He picked up several of the early Osborne computers, with Wordstar, and used Wordstar until he passed (I also got an Osborne out of that, when I was 10). Wordstar is the first word processor I ever used, and I used it a lot (wrote my first fiction story with it). It was an amazing piece of software, for what it had to work with. I loved it, despite its quirks (such as dot formatting).
- neilv 3y agoI think WordStar 3.3 is a little more the original essence: http://www.hampa.ch/pce/pics/ibmpc-apps/pce-mda-wordstar330.png http://www.hampa.ch/pce/pics/ibmpc-apps/pce-mda-wordstar330.... (Imagine this in curved, glowing, lower-res CRT phosphor.)
- tssva 3y agoMy word processor progression was: - Electric Pencil on a TRS-80 Model 1 - Word Writer on a C64 - PC-Write on an IBM XT - WordPerfect for DOS 4.2 on a XT clone - Describe for OS/2 - Lotus WordPro - WordPerfect for Windows - Microsoft Word - Google Docs I went to a mostly liberal arts university and the new my freshman year, 1987, computer lab consisted of around a dozen non-networked XT clones running WP 4.2. Two of them had dot matrix printers attached and were dedicated to printing. I had my own XT clone, which made me the computer lab for my friends, but no printer so WP 4.2 was somewhat forced on me. That being said I found it to be extremely productive and is the only one I have any sort of nostalgic feeling towards. Once AT layout keyboards became the norm it was much less productive to use. I know Microsoft Word is disliked around here, but I regularly produced complex documents hundreds of pages in length both by myself and in collaboration with others. I found it to be a good tool for doing so. I did try Wordstar at one point but it lost out to PC-Write which used many of the same control keys. I mostly retired a few months ago and now part time manage my fiancee's horse farm. Google Docs meets those needs.
- cbozeman 3y ago> I know Microsoft Word is disliked around here, but I regularly produced complex documents hundreds of pages in length both by myself and in collaboration with others. I found it to be a good tool for doing so. Anyone who doesn't think Microsoft Word is now on-par or superior to every other word processor in ability and function, tells me they have no idea how to use. Part of that is Microsoft - Word is extremely complex with, literally, hundreds of options, much of which you need to be actively taught (a high quality book or a long course) - the other part is that it's user interface is still very much rooted in earlier computer design ideology. It has to be. This kind of reminds me of the people who complained that Maya was so much more complex than KPT Bryce. Yeah... it has to be. One of them is almost unfathomably powerful for creating computer-generated graphics, and the other displays its limitations well within the first hour of usage.
- james_in_the_uk 3y ago+1 Microsoft Word is a very capable piece of software. If Microsoft's software engineers were forced to write board papers and legal contracts, it would probably be more intuitive too. IntelliSense for defined terms would be amazing.
- apricot 3y agoWait, a 6502 version of WordStar? I was a serious hobbyist in my Apple II days, and I never heard of that. I bought a Z80 expansion card so that I could run CP/M and WordStar on my Apple II (also Turbo Pascal, which was the main reason for getting the Z80 card).