Have you used Wordstar ?
One of the most interesting stories in the history of computing surrounds the dominant word processor of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s — Wordstar.
Its about one of the greatest piece of word processing software
Wordstar was written in pure machine language code, writing code in machine language is the work of a genius as all the modern programming languages convert English programming to machine language through a process called compilation machine language uses 0's and 1's using assembler.
It was 1978.
The world was beginning to see the dawn of computer technology in action, typewriters were slowly being replaced with the so called these super machines people in the industrialized nations feared job loss and job cuts in the biggest sector of employment - Typist, they feared their job will be taken over by the computer.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s Word processor meant WordStar.
Wordstar was the product I mastered during those times, I was an apprentice trainee working as a computer operator on Burroughs Mainframe Computers and just started to use PC PLUS computer from IBM, it consisted of 640KB RAM, no hard disk with an intel 8088 processor with two floppy drives of 360KB each.
The first floppy drive was meant to boot the system using Dos 3.2 OS and the second floppy drive was used to load WS (Wordstar). Both wordstar and Dos 3.12 used to be available on 5 1/4" floppy disks.
I was a specialist in installing and using wordstar during that time and was assigned to give technical support to over 500 wordstar users in the company that I worked during the mid and late 80's.
The software was commonly known as WS.com initially, later as WS4.com and evolved into WS2000.com. Whilst WS and WS4 were MS DOS based and WS2000 ran on Microsoft Windows 98 operating system.
I very well remember some the software commands of wordstar even today the Ctrl+W for saving, Ctrl+F to find and search, Ctrl+D, Function keys F4 and F10 etc., its sometimes nostalgic.
Wordstar was released in 1979 by Micropro International Inc.
Seymour Rubenstein was the brains behind wordstar. Rubenstein started Micropro International.
Rubenstein hired Barnaby to code wordstar, It took four months for Barnaby to code Wordstar. This was done in assembler from scratch.
Barnaby was the most famous programmer of the era.
It is said that during its successful days Sales of wordstar reached $70 million.
At the time Micropro was the biggest software company in the country !
Wordstar was still the best word processor on the market until the mid-1980’s.
In 1985, the company produced Wordstar2000, a copy protected program. Wordstar 2000 was big and slow and expensive and many users rejected it.
The company I worked for bought a few copies of WS2000 too but many of our users shunned it as it was bulky.
It is said that Wordstar was the product that invented the “what you see is what you get” notion later to be dubbed WYSIWYG.
It also invented numerous features including overlays which later to developed into DLL’s.It was the first product to implement dynamic pagination and help levels.
I salute this little piece of gem software, its creators and its wonderful legacy.
Joy and Laughter,
Krish Madampath