Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years.
TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust.
In brief: Before Microsoft Word became the de-facto standard for word processing on the PC, the market was rich with choice. WordStar is a program many great writers started their career on, and now even the most juvenile authors can easily access this classic tool thanks to DOS emulation and a repackaging effort by Robert Sawyer.
Science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer uses WordStar 7.0 to write his award-winning stories. The word processor was last updated in December 1992, meaning it has been "defunct" for decades and could be considered abandonware. While there is no legal consensus about how such software and copyright laws should interact, Sawyer is confident enough that he can provide the last WordStar version for DOS to other people through the internet.
The Canadian author decided to create a "proper" archive for WordStar for DOS 7.0 Rev. D, working for weeks to add some additional material and make the program easier to run on modern systems. The 680 MB download includes WordStar and a pair of DOS emulators (DOSBox-X and vDosPlus) to quickly launch it on Windows. The archive provides the full installs of the program as well as images of the installation disks, PDF versions of the seven original manuals, additional utility programs, and more.
WordStar has been a big part of Sawyer's career, as he wrote all 25 of his novels, his short stories, and freelance articles with it. The "finest word-processing program ever created" is still in use by other authors as well including Ralph Ellison, George R. R. Martin, Andy Breckman, and Anne Rice.
WordStar was originally developed by Rob Barnaby in 1978 for the CP/M-80 operating system, but it was later ported to MS-DOS and Windows. The program was a dominant force in the 80s, and according to columnist John Dvorak it was among the most pirated software in the world. As the Vampire Chronicles writer Anne Rice said, WordStar was a "magnificent" program to write stories in. "It was logical, beautiful, perfect. Compared to it, Microsoft Word is pure madness," Rice said.
MicroPro, the original publisher of WordStar, is long gone. Thanks to Sawyer's efforts, anyone can now run the program on a Windows computer in a matter of minutes. The archived files can also be used on Linux and Mac machines, as DOSBox-X is compatible with these operating systems as well.
Sawyer is thinking about his own legacy, too. "Once I'm gone," the author said, "my literary estate will need to deal with my electronic manuscripts, and my executor should be able to work with them on her own computer rather than just mine." Arthur C. Clarke and "countless" other authors who are no longer on this planet wrote with WordStar, and Sawyer hopes that his archive will be useful to scholars as well.