Author makes 30-year-old “best text editor ever” available

“Never change a running system”: This is the motto that sci-fi author Robert J. Sawyer has followed throughout his career when he used the now ancient ‘WordStar for DOS’. To ensure that it is not lost, he has now re-released it, well documented.

Sci-fi author saves cult software

Once you get used to a software, it can be difficult to use other tools – why would you, when all the functions you need are there? Even with writing software, there is a close-knit community of enthusiasts who use and maintain old programs. Robert J. Sawyer is now helping to save the WordStar program for DOS 7.0 for future generations. As the author writes in a Blog post writes, the software was last updated in 1992, and the developer company MicroPro, later simply WordStar, has long since ceased to exist. Since then, however, the program has continued to be used by enthusiasts like Sawyer. The problem: there is no real archive of WordStar for DOS 7.0 to be found on the Internet. “So I decided to create one,” says the author.

As Sawyer describes it, he invested weeks of work to preserve the program. He now provides all the images of the installation disks in a 680 megabyte archive file. To make it easier to use, he also adds plug-and-play solutions (Dosbox and Vdosplus) for running WordStar for DOS 7.0 under Windows. The documentation is also included: all seven manuals are available as searchable PDF versions, and he adds many of his own explanations on how to use and customize WordStar, as well as utilities and “numerous other goodies.”

Small community

Sawyer admits that only a small circle of people will be interested in his work – George RR Martin, for example, is known to use the even older WordStar 4.0: “I wanted to create a monument to the best word processing program ever created.” Then he adds a quote from his fellow author Anne Rice: “WordStar was great. I loved it. It was logical, beautiful, perfect. Compared to that, Microsoft Word is pure madness.” The Archive of WordStar for DOS 7.0 is available for download on Robert J. Sawyer’s website.