WordStar

I have a soft spot for WordStar¹. It was one of the critical software programs with which I started my computer career. While in college in the later part of the 1990s, my part-time job was entering text in WordStar before graduating to Aldus Pagemaker².

“WordStar was first introduced in 1978, and the final release — WordStar for DOS 7.0 Rev. D — came out in December 1992. The program has never been updated since, and the company that made it has been defunct for decades; it is abandonware.”

A Canadian science-fiction writer, Robert J. Sawyer, made an Archive available complete with extensive resources on how to use it. In addition, fully text-searchable PDFs of the original manuals, totaling over 1,000 pages, were also available. He is a dedicated WordStar user.

A Backup of the Download (680MB) is available from Archive.org.

Since MS-DOS programs, such as WordStar, can’t run under modern operating systems without using an MS-DOS emulator, he has provided two complete plug-and-play packages for running WordStar under Windows, one using DOSBox-X, an emulator that’s still actively developed and maintained, and another using vDosPlus, which still works wonderfully but is no longer maintained.

WordStar will also run just fine under Linux or Mac OS if you use the appropriate versions of DOSBox-X.

WordStar is known to be popular with, but not limited to, Arthur C. Clarke, Anne Rice, and George R. R. Martin.