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I only know Wordstar as being the text editor GRR Martin uses to write on his DOS machine: https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/14/5716232/george-r-r-martin-uses-do

I only know Wordstar as being the text editor GRR Martin uses to write on his DOS machine: https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/14/5716232/george-r-r-martin-uses-dos-wordstar-to-write https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/14/5716232/george-r-r-martin...

LeoPanthera 3y ago
Wordstar was the dominant word processor because it was designed from the ground up to be as portable as possible, which made it available on a wide variety of 80s home computers, particularly those running CP/M. Eventually that portability came to hurt it, because eventually everyone was running DOS, and Wordstar couldn't take advantage of DOS's unique environment, and so WordPerfect came along and ate its lunch.
- deepspace 3y ago
  > couldn't take advantage of DOS's unique environment In what sense? I came from a CP/M environment, and Wordstar transferred just fine to DOS. Funnily enough, I tried Word Perfect and Word for DOS at about the same time. Word's way of doing things just made sense to me, while Word Perfect was always 'that weird word processor'. At the time, I was in the minority, but I guess I've been vindicated by history.
  - LeoPanthera 3y ago
    From Wikipedia: "DOS WordStar was not explicitly designed for IBM PCs, but rather for any x86 machine (as there were a number of non-IBM-compatible PCs that used 8086 or 80186 CPUs). As such, it used only DOS's API calls and avoided any BIOS usage or direct hardware access. This carried with it an unfortunate performance penalty as everything had to be "double" processed (meaning that the DOS API functions would handle screen or keyboard I/O first and then pass them to the BIOS)." "The first DOS version of WordStar, demoed by Jim Fox and executed by a team of Irish programmers in April 1982, was a port of the CP/M-86 version of WordStar, which in turn had been ported from the CP/M-80 version in September 1981. This had been started by Diane Hajicek and was completed by an Irish team of programmers under ISIS-II, probably using Intel's source-to-source translator CONV86. Thus the main program executable was a .COM file which could only access 64 kB of memory. Users quickly learned they could make WordStar run dramatically faster by installing a RAM disk board, and copying the WordStar program files into it. WordStar would still access the "disk" repeatedly, but the far faster access of the RAM drive compared to a floppy disk yielded a substantial speed improvement. However, edited versions of a document were "saved" only to this RAM disk, and had to be copied to physical media before rebooting." "At that time, the evolution from CP/M to MS-DOS, with an "Alt" key, had taken place. WordStar had until then never successfully exploited the MS-DOS keyboard, and that is one explanation for its demise."

LeoPanthera 3y ago

Wordstar was the dominant word processor because it was designed from the ground up to be as portable as possible, which made it available on a wide variety of 80s home computers, particularly those running CP/M. Eventually that portability came to hurt it, because eventually everyone was running DOS, and Wordstar couldn't take advantage of DOS's unique environment, and so WordPerfect came along and ate its lunch.

deepspace 3y ago
> couldn't take advantage of DOS's unique environment In what sense? I came from a CP/M environment, and Wordstar transferred just fine to DOS. Funnily enough, I tried Word Perfect and Word for DOS at about the same time. Word's way of doing things just made sense to me, while Word Perfect was always 'that weird word processor'. At the time, I was in the minority, but I guess I've been vindicated by history.
- LeoPanthera 3y ago
  From Wikipedia: "DOS WordStar was not explicitly designed for IBM PCs, but rather for any x86 machine (as there were a number of non-IBM-compatible PCs that used 8086 or 80186 CPUs). As such, it used only DOS's API calls and avoided any BIOS usage or direct hardware access. This carried with it an unfortunate performance penalty as everything had to be "double" processed (meaning that the DOS API functions would handle screen or keyboard I/O first and then pass them to the BIOS)." "The first DOS version of WordStar, demoed by Jim Fox and executed by a team of Irish programmers in April 1982, was a port of the CP/M-86 version of WordStar, which in turn had been ported from the CP/M-80 version in September 1981. This had been started by Diane Hajicek and was completed by an Irish team of programmers under ISIS-II, probably using Intel's source-to-source translator CONV86. Thus the main program executable was a .COM file which could only access 64 kB of memory. Users quickly learned they could make WordStar run dramatically faster by installing a RAM disk board, and copying the WordStar program files into it. WordStar would still access the "disk" repeatedly, but the far faster access of the RAM drive compared to a floppy disk yielded a substantial speed improvement. However, edited versions of a document were "saved" only to this RAM disk, and had to be copied to physical media before rebooting." "At that time, the evolution from CP/M to MS-DOS, with an "Alt" key, had taken place. WordStar had until then never successfully exploited the MS-DOS keyboard, and that is one explanation for its demise."