
What ever happened to Wordstar? - DanBC
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/whatever-happened-to-wordstar-2/
======
Evolved
George R. R. Martin said he still uses it and one of the reasons he cited was
that he types all his novels on a computer not connected to the Internet so he
doesn't have to worry about hackers leaking his material and also because of
all the names, places, etc. in the book being made up, it doesn't have spell
check to keep interfering with his writing.(0)

(0)
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/14/george_r_...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/14/george_r_r_martin_writes_on_dos_based_wordstar_4_0_software_from_the_1980s.html)

~~~
technosmurf
WordStar is popular with science fiction writers for more fundamental reasons.
(Not because it doesn't have spell check or isn't connected to the internet.)

Wordstar treats the text like a long-hand manuscript. You can add notes to
yourself like "fix this!" and deal with the edits later. Or, you can block
copy large sections of text and have the computer keep a reference to it
without having to "copy and paste" it immediately. I've seen George RR Martin
write that he likes how easy it is to move large sections of text around in
WordStar.

Here's how the SF writer Robert J. Sawyer describes it:

"... as a creative writer, I am convinced that the long-hand page is the
better metaphor.

Consider: On a long-hand page, you can jump back and forth in your document
with ease. You can put in bookmarks, either actual paper ones, or just fingers
slipped into the middle of the manuscript stack. You can annotate the
manuscript for yourself with comments like "Fix this!" or "Don't forget to
check these facts" without there being any possibility of you missing them
when you next work on the document. And you can mark a block, either by
circling it with your pen, or by physically cutting it out, without
necessarily having to do anything with it right away. The entire document is
your workspace...

WordStar's ^Q (Quick cursor movement) and ^K (block) commands give me more of
what I used to have when I wrote in longhand than any other product does.
WordStar's powerful suite of cursor commands lets me fly all over my
manuscript, without ever getting lost. That's because WordStar is constantly
keeping track of where I've been and where I'm likely to want to go. ^QB will
take me to the beginning of the marked block; ^QK will take me to the end; ^QV
will take me to where the marked block was moved from; ^QP will take me to my
previous cursor position. And, just as I used to juggle up to ten fingers
inserted into various places in my paper manuscript, WordStar provides me with
ten bookmarks, set with ^K0 through ^K9, and ten commands to jump to them, ^Q0
to ^Q9...

WordStar, with its long-hand-page metaphor, says, hey, do whatever you want
whenever you want to. This is a good spot to mark the beginning of a block?
Fine. What would you like to do next? Deal with the block? Continue writing?
Use the thesaurus?

After another half hour of writing, I can say, ah hah!, this is where I want
to end that block. And two hours later I can say, and this is where that block
should go. I'm in control, not the program. That's clearly more powerful, more
intuitive, and more flexible than any other method of text manipulation I've
yet seen implemented in a word processor. That WordStar lets me have separate
marked blocks in each of its editing windows multiplies that power
substantially: imagine doing a cut and paste job between two versions of a
paper document, but being told that you could only have one piece cut out at a
time. Madness! Yet that's what WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and others would
force you to do. (In WordStar 7.0, you can even, in essence, have two marked
blocks per window, toggling between them with the "mark previous block"
command, ^KU.)"

[http://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm](http://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm)

~~~
Vexs
Wow, it kind of sounds insane that we don't have multiple-copy paste by
default now. Come to think, I can think of a bunch of times where I open up
notepad to store a copy-paste.

~~~
avian
I seem to remember that Windows had at one point something called "clipbook".
I was under the impression at the time that it was about multi copy-paste, but
I never figured out how it worked. Probably few people did.

~~~
jandrese
MacOS back in the System 7 era (1990s) had a clipbook utility that shipped
with the OS. MacOS had generally better copy and paste support in general
though, since it could handle virtually any file format the computer could
handle. Text, audio, pictures, even video were all valid in the cut buffer.

~~~
mschaef
Windows has had clipboard format negotiation since the beginning. When an
application copies data into the clipboard, it can do so in multiple formats.
Each format can be rendered either eagerly or lazily by the application
putting data into the clipboard.

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/desktop/ms649051\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

Applications that wish to get data from the clipboard can then enumerate the
available formats and select the format that matches what they can use.

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/desktop/ms649051\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

[http://www.mschaef.com/blog/tech/excel/what_is_in_your_clipb...](http://www.mschaef.com/blog/tech/excel/what_is_in_your_clipboard.txt)

------
technofiend
Wordstar was good stuff! Between Wordstar and MultiWrite we sold hundreds of
Kaypro machines bundled with loud as hell daisy wheel printers to my fellow
college classmates. Unless they lived alone almost everyone returned a day or
two later for the sound proofed printer enclosure. Why daisy wheel printers?
At the time our professors refused to take dot matrix printouts for class
assignments or papers; it took a couple of years for Epson's higher print
density heads to appear and produce "good enough" output.

More amusingly - WordStar inspired a slew of -star knockoffs including one for
farm management called DirtStar. Urban Dictionary has a very different
definition for that word today.

At least when I was selling personal computers out of a MicroAge what slowly
strangled WordStar sales was IBM DisplayWrite and Word Perfect both of which
served the legal community much better. Microsoft Word and Apple's MacWrite
didn't help either. And to a much lesser degree IBM's choice of swapping the
control and shift keys made WordStar's navigation unnatural. You either had to
adapt or order a special keyboard with CTRL back where it belonged. I've never
forgiven them for that change. (Damn you, IBM! :shakes fist:)

~~~
chiph
I had to suffer through DisplayWrite at one job. What a horror. Word Perfect
was .. nearly perfect. If only they had made the transition to Windows
faster/better they'd still be a major force in the market.

~~~
technofiend
DisplayWrite had a lot of traction because of IBM systems that came before it.
The idea of running it on an IBM PC and later a clone was very appealing to
people leasing IBM gear. I guess it's all relative.

Word Perfect's tutorials were so good my non-computer-literate wife taught
herself to use it in the space of a couple of days. It was pretty darn good.

------
fractallyte
The WordStar mailing list at YahooGroups is still (occasionally) active, but
shrinking, as many members are getting rather elderly...

A recurrent topic is how to keep the software working on the latest versions
of Windows. Science fiction author Robert Sawyer recently posted definitive
instructions: [http://sfwriter.com/ws-vdos.htm](http://sfwriter.com/ws-
vdos.htm)

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
There is a chapter on WordStar in "In Search of Stupidity" by Merrill Chapman.

In it Chapman says that this was due to internal and external confusion and
competition between WordStar and Wordstar2000.

The book is a great read by the way.

~~~
whatever_dude
Ditto, I really recommend this book. Made me understand 80's software world a
lot more, and especially not see Microsoft as being as evil as I liked to
believe it was; merely the one who survived among a lot of companies doing
really shady stuff.

~~~
njharman
That doesn't make ms less evil. It should clue you in that all (big) companies
are evil.

~~~
treehau5
I'm convinced "bigness" in any form, is evil. Big government, big corporation,
big lobbying groups, big egos.

~~~
mschaef
IMO, it's probably more accurate to say that big entities are often a more
effective tool for evil than small entities. Of course, it's also probably
accurate to say that big entities are often a more effective tool for good
than small entities.

~~~
JadeNB
This is probably too much of a tangent on which to take this discussion, but
the fact that big entities are a tool for evil might give rise to the further
question: so why are there invariably people in big institutions who will try
to use them as such tools? I would suspect that it such people exist in all
institutions, almost regardless of size, but that there will simply be more of
them in a bigger institution, and that they are more likely to be able to hide
their wrongdoing from the sight of those who would promote a more idealistic
mission (or else that they gain sufficient control of the culture that they
have no need to hide).

~~~
mschaef
You're right... this is a tangent, and I've been debating whether or not to
respond for that reason. That said, a couple thoughts.

First: you focused on the 'evil' part of my statement at the exclusion of the
'good'. Is this intentional? I don't think it's possible to have a reasonable
discussion if you exclude half of the 'domain'.

I don't really think that people within large corporations have a higher
likelihood of intent to do evil than people within small corporations.
However, given that a larger entity is a more effective way to effect change,
I do think that both evil-doers and good-doers can be more evident in large
organizations. There's also more of a network effect, etc. An evil-doer in a
large corporation is more likely to have a spectacular impact and in a small.
(ie: the collapse of Enron vs the collapse of the local propane shop.)

Coming back around to the good, I also think that modern civilization owes its
continued existence to entities that are larger than we might be comfortable
with. Providing energy, etc. for 7B people is just too big a problem to leave
in the hands of something like a vast number of local propane shops, even if a
bunch of local propane shops are somehow 'safer'. It's a lack of effectiveness
that makes those shops safer and it's the same lack of effectiveness that
makes those shops less likely to be able to address large-scale problems.

~~~
JadeNB
> You're right... this is a tangent, and I've been debating whether or not to
> respond for that reason. That said, a couple thoughts.

Hmm. You bring up good points, which I don't want to ignore, but I also don't
want to be responsible for prolonging the tangent indefinitely. Let's say that
I'll say my piece, and then you say yours if you like, and then we'll leave it
at that, no matter how good your response is. :-)

> First: you focused on the 'evil' part of my statement at the exclusion of
> the 'good'. Is this intentional? I don't think it's possible to have a
> reasonable discussion if you exclude half of the 'domain'.

No, it was not intentional _per se_ ; it's just that the discussion prior to
your post had been about evil, and that's what was on my mind.

> I don't really think that people within large corporations have a higher
> likelihood of intent to do evil than people within small corporations.

I _think_ that this is pretty close to what I was trying to say here:

> I would suspect that it such people exist in all institutions, almost
> regardless of size, but that there will simply be more of them in a bigger
> institution ….

I meant to, but did not clearly, emphasise that I was _not_ imputing a higher
likelihood of evil to members of a bigger organisation; rather, it is just
that the same probability in a larger sample space will produce more hits (of
evildoers as well as "gooddoers").

> An evil-doer in a large corporation is more likely to have a spectacular
> impact [than] in a small.

I thought that I'd said something like this, but I find on reading my post
that the closest I got was this:

> they are more likely to be able to hide their wrongdoing from the sight of
> those who would promote a more idealistic mission ….

Your way of putting it is better.

> Coming back around to the good, I also think that modern civilization owes
> its continued existence to entities that are larger than we might be
> comfortable with.

This is an interesting point, and probably true, although (largely out of
inherent bias) I have a problem thinking of a large organisation as 'good'. I
guess my belief is that people are basically selfish (evil is too strong), and
that this selfishness in a large organisation is likely to act against me (at
least if I don't belong to the organisation); and that the only principle that
I give a chance against basic selfishness is personal ties and bonds, which
are more likely to inform the actions of a small than of a large organisation.

------
morazow
Offtopic, I know one person who still uses Wordstar heavily. And I hope he
keeps using it :)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg)

~~~
rwmj
I know someone who still uses LocoScript. Thankfully the PC version rather
than the Amstrad PCW version. Old word processors take a long time to die.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LocoScript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LocoScript)

~~~
LarryMade2
Most authors I've met, once they get on a roll in writing they stick with
whatever is working with them from manual typewriter, Commodore 64, or DOS box
- if its making em selling books - why risk change.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
You see this across all the creative fields… tools that are superior to
Photoshop and Illustrator have cropped up countless times, but I’ve never met
a photographer or graphic designer who could move beyond whatever it was he
used in college. It’s a miracle that InDesign even managed to usurp Quark
X-Press…

~~~
egypturnash
A lot of this is that these "superior" tools usually try to implement about
50% of the dinosaur's features. For people who don't use that last arcane 50%
they're fine - but for people who do, they're useless.

That said the past few releases of Illustrator have been a mess and I've been
getting really tempted to try and see if the latest version of Affinity Design
can do all the Illustrator things that I've shaped my workflow around for the
last decade. But I feel like if I'm going to spend the time to learn a new
tool I'd really rather learn one that's going to open up new places, rather
than just take me to the same place in a different way. Which is why I have
Blender open in another window right now.

InDesign usurped Quark for a couple of reasons: everyone hated Quark, even
people who used it on a daily basis, and Quark took forever to move from MacOS
to OSX. That gap offered people a huge excuse to spend some time learning a
new tool that held out a hope of sucking less.

~~~
smacktoward
Don't forget that Quark was also copy-protection mad and insisted on things
like stupid hardware dongles if you wanted to actually use the software you
bought from them. Forcing paying customers to jump through flaming hoops to
use your products is a great way to turn them into ex-customers.

------
PhantomGremlin
This program was fantastic, given the limitations of the computers at the
time.

    
    
         WordStar ran well
         on a 4 MHz Z80 computer
         with 64K bytes of memory.
    

Go ahead, read that sentence again!

WordStar would try to update its (sort of WYSIWYG) screen display while you
were typing, but it would often lag. That was because many computers were
connected not to an internal video display card, but to an external terminal
via an RS-232 serial interface running at 19,200 baud (1,920 characters per
second). Fortunately the display output was as ASCII characters, not
bitmapped, so that lessened the processing requirements quite a bit.

Whenever WordStar detected that its screen rendering was lagging behind the
input typing, it would very cleverly "skip ahead" in the rendering. The result
was that the computer felt quite responsive at all times.

~~~
angersock
64K! Pah!

I've got stylesheets larger than that. :|

(oh god where have we gone wrong)

------
colanderman
Note that those looking for a WordStar/TurboC-like experience these days can
find solace in JOE:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe's_Own_Editor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe's_Own_Editor)

~~~
amyjess
Well, that brings back memories.

Before I learned vim, JOE was my preferred editor. Back in the day, vim
intimidated me too much for me to try to learn it, but nano felt horribly
primitive and featureless. JOE struck the perfect balance for me. Of course,
eventually I sucked it up and learned vim, and now it's my preferred editor,
but JOE will always have a special place in my heart.

I'd recommend JOE to anyone who wants something that's easy to use but doesn't
want something totally primitive.

------
kragen
> Wordstar was the product that invented the “what you see is what you get”
> notion later to be dubbed WYSIWYG

TECO Emacs was already as WYSIWYG than WordStar years previously, to say
nothing of Bravo and other such PARC work from the early 1970s.

> It invented numerous features including overlays, later to develop into
> DLL’s.

Overlays date from at least the 1960s; Fred Brooks (I think? Unless it was
Plauger?) famously lamented that the OS/360 linker had history's best overlay
support, at exactly the moment that the advent of paged virtual memory made
overlays obsolete.

WordStar's UI certainly was very influential.

~~~
kens
Thanks for mentioning Xerox PARC's Bravo editor. This 1974 editor was the
first WYSIWYG editor and supported multiple, proportionally-spaced fonts. If
you look at the screenshots, Wordstar (1979) was character-based so I don't
see how it could be called WYSIWYG.

The article says: "All modern word processors owe their existence to
Wordstar". That's just nonsense, since the Bravo editor was written by Charles
Simonyi, who then wrote Word. It would be more accurate to say that all modern
word processors owe their existence to Bravo.

~~~
kragen
If you were printing on a fixed-pitch character-based printer (like most dot-
matrix and daisy-wheel or golf-ball "letter-quality" printers of the time)
then what you saw on the screen in WordStar was very much like what you would
get on the printer, although WS did support bold and underline, which typical
terminals didn't. Also the terminals were usually white (or green, or amber)
on black, while the printers were invariably black on white.

Do you know how far back screen editing (WordStar-style "WYSIWYG") in TECO
goes? I'm pretty sure DEC TECO didn't have screen editing even in the late
1970s, and CP/M ED certainly didn't, which I am guessing means MIT TECO didn't
have it at the point that DEC forked it. But it wouldn't be very surprising to
me if MIT TECO had screen editing before 1974.

[http://multicians.org/mepap.html](http://multicians.org/mepap.html) seems to
suggest that MIT TECO had screen editing by 1971:

> An implementation of TECO (a version of which is the standard DEC editor)
> was built on Multics in 1971. This version was derived from the original
> TECO implementation, on the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10 [TECDOC]. Unlike the latter,
> Multics TECO has no display support, and does not have the complex control-
> structure constructs of the AI Lab editor.

You will note, though, that even with screen editing support, TECO remained
shamelessly command-oriented and modeful until the adoption of "Control R
mode" in the late 1970s, presumably inspired by Bravo's less-modal interface.
(I hesitate to say "modeless," though it was close.)

I think "the Bravo editor was written by Charles Simonyi" is at best
oversimplified. One version of the Bravo manual says, "Bravo was designed by
Butler Lampson and Charles Simonyi, and implemented mainly by Tom Malloy, with
substantial contributions from Carol Hankins, Greg Kusnick, Kate Rosenbloom,
and Bob Shur." I don't think Simonyi wrote much of Word either, except in the
sense that Reagan "wrote" Peggy Noonan's speeches; in _Programmers at Work_ he
talked about his process and about Tom Malloy:
[https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/programmers-at-
work-...](https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/programmers-at-work-charles-
simonyi/)

------
grimgrin
I'm thinking I don't have all my facts straight with this question, but:

A really successful bookstore in my town has been using a networked DOS POS
system since as long as they've had POS software. I asked about it once,
liking the look of the old monitors and antiquated user interface, and I
thought they called it Wordstar. They gave me some more details like how there
is still one support company that will actually help them from time to time
when they need something looked into. Mostly saying that they've never moved
on because it does (almost) exactly what they need.

But now I'm thinking I either a) misheard them, or b) I'm just confusing
myself right now because the wording was similar.

Has Wordstar been used in addition to word processing for custom
solutions/software?

edit: giving it some more thought, I'm now wondering if they were using
Wordstar or otherwise for inventory purposes only, and using ANOTHER piece of
software for the actual sales.

edit: looks like I am very possibly thinking of
[http://www.wordstock.com/o_view.html](http://www.wordstock.com/o_view.html)

------
kpgraham
I remember sitting with John Dvorak at his private party in the Sands at
Comdex in Vegas. John was buying and we got very very drunk. The occasion was
a wake for the obvious demise of Wordstar, which we both preferred. Word
Perfect basically out marketed Wordstar by giving away tens of thousands of
demo copies at Comdex and Soft-Sell. Word Perfect had a half-assed WYSIWYG but
John called it WISHYWYG (you wish what what you see is what you get). The
doomed Wordstar was a better product in almost all respects, but Word Perfect
was able to market them out of business.

------
pitchups
>In four months Barnaby wrote 137,000 lines of bullet-proof assembly language
code. Rubenstein later checked with some friends from IBM who calculated
Barnaby’s output as 42-man years.*

That effectively makes Barnaby 42*3 or 126 times more productive than a normal
programmer!

~~~
skizm
IF HR departments find this out, they will now stop looking for 10x
programmers and start looking for 126x programmers.

~~~
_pmf_
Too bad most HR people are 0.003x recruiters and at maximum 0.9x standard form
emailers, otherwise they might actually find what they're looking for.

------
DanBC
One thing this article doesn't mention is "executive word processors".

These were cut down versions of full word processors, because executives were
not expected to have spent time learning the full package.

Here's an article from 1988 comparing a bunch of different PC word processors:
[http://jvlone.com/computerpub/InfoWorld/IW_1988-09-26_x-
x_Ex...](http://jvlone.com/computerpub/InfoWorld/IW_1988-09-26_x-
x_ExecutiveWordProcessors.pdf)

------
TorKlingberg
I can imagine adding "undo" to a 137,000 line assembly application was not
easy.

~~~
rikkus
I've often been at the start of a project and campaigned to have undo support
baked in at the start. To me, it's not one of those features you should leave
until when it's needed, as it affects the design of the entire system.

I've never managed to persuade product owners to bake it in, though - and so
far every time I've pleaded to do so, they've ended up asking for it later
(after swearing they'd never do so at project start).

I've considered picking designs that support undo without getting explicit
approval to do so, but there's an additional complexity involved that means
juniors will raise questions about the design and eventually you would have to
admit 'so we can support undo', so that's not wise!

~~~
david-given
I added Undo support to WordGrinder after the fact (<plug>
[http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/](http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/) </plug>).
Wasn't easy.

WordGrinder's data model is that a document is a Lua table (== array) of
paragraphs; each paragraph is a table of words; each word is a string. This
means that the data structures are all reasonably small in most common use so
I can get away with O(n) insertion within them.

What I did for undo support was that I made paragraphs and words immutable;
adding a word to a paragraph actually copied the paragraph, with the new one
referring to the same words that were in the old one, plus the new word.
Again, all quite cheap because the structures were small. But this means that
I can now copy the entire _document_ for each level in the undo stack, because
I since paragraphs are immutable I can share them across multiple levels in
the undo stack.

Surprisingly, it worked.

The tl;dr here is: immutable data structures are awesome, and I should totally
have designed in undo right at the beginning.

------
mih
Site HN'ed. Here's the cached version -
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L7tvlsg...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L7tvlsgf8EsJ:www.dvorak.org/blog/whatever-
happened-to-wordstar-2/+&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de)

------
anexprogrammer
"Eventually Word Perfect rose to the top based on its superior support
program"

Wordstar 2000 wasn't bad, and was far more accessible than Wordperfect that
had a distinctly unfriendly learning curve for non techies. Many never took to
Wordperfect as you had to learn its codes and it wasn't even WYSIWYG. Even
when it became so it was grudgingly and only sort-of.

Wordstar floundered around for a decade seemingly with no idea where they were
going. That they survived at all through that period is surprising and speaks
of the success of the earlier product.

------
mhd
Keyboards got cursor keys and mice, so the Wordstar diamond wasn't as
great/needed anymore for the general user.

It has its fanbase, but then again, a lot of dead word processors do.
Especially amongst journalists, where Amiga word processors and XyWrite still
are being kept alive artificially...

~~~
bhaak
Amiga word processors? Why and which ones?

Given that the Amiga never got a strong hold in media outlets unless it was
video related, the statement "especially amongst journalists" needs some
backing.

Back in the day, even Amiga magazine weren't done on the Amiga. AFAIK, most
used what the industry used (that is, Macs).

~~~
mhd
I was mostly using it as an example for something quite rare and seemingly
weird, even compared to WordStar or WordPerfect. If your newspaper, magazine
or website uses some kind of CMS that's based on text files, any old editor or
word processor would do. It's not like they'd accept the native formats of
WordStar/XyWrite, so once you're down to .txt, anything goes (if UTF-8 is
mandatory, some more tech savviness might be required).

I think that an Amiga was explicitly mentioned in an old article about
Germany's heise publishing house (mostly known for tech publications, so maybe
a bit more accepting in that regard). Germany also had a pretty large Amiga
fanbase, so that might bias things. (And I remember Ataris being quite popular
in publishing, too)

------
jacquesm
It was murdered by VC's and Microsoft Word ate the remains.

~~~
jandrese
Also, the followup product had some pain in the ass DRM system and above
reasonable price point. The exact kind of innovations you start to see when
the company stops caring about making the best product possible and instead
wastes a lot of time and energy fighting pirates.

------
zubairq
Wordstar 2000 was made by Edward Jong, who has since moved on to create his
own graph programming language, Beads:

[http://www.e-dejong.com/the-beads-project/](http://www.e-dejong.com/the-
beads-project/)

------
webwanderings
I used to use Wordstar a lot in young age. There was another software I used
to use, which would let you create tables by hand, and let you fill data in
it. For the life of me, I can't recall the name of that software. Unlike
today's HTML tables, things were really WYSIWYG back then, between your
monitor and the dot matrix printer.

~~~
MrTonyD
I think I used that software too. I don't remember the name either. It was
sold as a database program (those were early days for relational) and they
tried to present a database as tables in WYSIWYG. So everything was filling-in
graphical tables and then defining operations on them (in some customized
BASIC.) Actually, I remember that program as being very popular at the time. I
seem to remember that they eventually abandoned the "graphical relational
database" and became more focused on the graphical creation of the reports
produced.

~~~
Tagbert
Was it Reflex? Originally sold by Analytica and later aquired by Borland.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Reflex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Reflex)

~~~
MrTonyD
I don't think it was Reflex...I think I was still on CPM. It seems like an
early precursor to that program though. Honestly, my memory is pretty fuzzy -
it wasn't much of a database program, it mostly just reorganized the tables in
some simple ways (I remember wondering if the program's authors really
understood relational. They seemed to be mostly just creating tables and doing
a few operations. Jumping on the relational buzzword.) It was impressive to
see it build boxes though - in those days, that was an accomplishment.

~~~
webwanderings
Yes, agree. Do you recall orange colored interface? That's the only thing I
recall, beyond creating tables/boxes and filling in the data.

~~~
DanBC
Just checking: was the orange interface a monochrome, amber, screen?

It's surprisingly hard to search for this kind of stuff.

I had a go, but not successfully.

I did find this list of software, which might trigger a memory?

Cardfile,

pfs:file,

QuickFile,

PC File[1],

4th Dimension,

Paradox,

dBase,

Filemaker,

foxpro,

Nutshell,

Vulcan,

[http://www.retrocomputing.net/info/allan/eBook13.pdf](http://www.retrocomputing.net/info/allan/eBook13.pdf)

[http://jeanne-sewell.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/history-of-
datab...](http://jeanne-sewell.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/history-of-database-
software.html)

~~~
MrTonyD
None of those names sound right to me. Back in those days someone could write
some software, put it on a floppy, xerox some instructions and put it all into
a big plastic sandwich bag. Our computer store would then put it on a shelf to
sell. That was how it was done back then. I remember calling a couple of
companies and talking directly to the developer. Most of the products you
mention came much later. It wouldn't surprise me if there isn't any
information about those early products - except among a few old timers on
blogs like this one. And some products were strictly regional - depending on
which computer stores were visited by the developer. But I appreciate your
effort to help the OP.

------
drauh
I learnt it in high school on a counterfeit Apple ][ with an 80-column display
card. (Maybe it ran CP/M? My memory is hazy.) I had to type up the school's
Prize-Giving Day program. When I got to college (late 1980s) and got my first
programming job on campus, I copped a grad student's .emacs file which made
Emacs behave like WordStar. I used it all the way through to my postdoc,
modifying the necessary major modes to not conflict with WS bindings. I ran
into the author of that .emacs file, but he had moved on to Jove, by then.

The upside of using WordStar bindings was that, as a de facto sysadmin in
various academic departments and labs, I could never answer peoples' questions
about Emacs.

A more complete history is here: [http://www.wordstar.org/index.php/wordstar-
history](http://www.wordstar.org/index.php/wordstar-history)

~~~
matthewn
Apple ][s could run CP/M if outfitted with an expansion card sold by
Microsoft:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard)

A friend of mine had that card specifically so he could run WordStar on his
Apple; I'm certain he was not alone.

------
dredmorbius
Dvorak's comment on piracy stands out -- it was a _useful_ marketing model:

 _And despite complaints by the company and others, people wanted software
they could copy and use on more than one machine. During this era piracy sold
software and created market share. People would use a bootleg copy of Wordstar
and eventually buy a copy. Wordstar may have been the most pirated software in
the world, which in many ways accounted for its success. (Software companies
don’t like to admit to this as a possibility.)_

Bill Gates somewhat famously _did_ admit this talking of piracy of Windows
especially in East Asia -- he'd much rather a pirated copy of Windows was
running than a legal copy of GNU/Linux.

------
pjmlp
"It invented numerous features including overlays, later to develop into
DLL’s. It was the first product with dynamic pagination and even help levels
among other new features. All modern word processors owe their existence to
Wordstar — perhaps one of the greatest single software efforts in the history
of computing."

I imagine he never saw the word processors developed at Xerox PARC, nor their
OSes dynamic loading capabilities.

------
jamespitts
I have a lot to thank the humble and useful Wordstar for.

In college, I worked at a law firm and they were still using wordstar as well
as wordperfect. Wordstar had this interesting markup that I quickly learned,
and it was faster to use than moving around the screen with a mouse. Later on
when I first viewed source on a web page, the markup looked quite familiar.

My new career as a web developer had begun.

------
Keyframe
Wordstar had a sort of vim-like quality to it, where you could type your way
with ease and power without using a mouse.

------
chmaynard
In today's startup culture, Rob Barnaby would probably have been a co-founder
instead of a technical lead. With an ownership stake in the company, perhaps
he would have taken the initiative and re-written Wordstar in a high-level
language.

------
guelo
I was more interested in the Barnaby fellow than the businessman's boring
story.

------
sbmassey
It sounds like the underlying problem was that the original, elegant software
implementation quickly turned into a ball of mud when other programmers
started working on it. Wouldn't happen nowadays, of course.

------
elmar
Talk about productivity

"In four months Barnaby wrote 137,000 lines of bullet-proof assembly language
code. Rubenstein later checked with some friends from IBM who calculated
Barnaby’s output as 42-man years."

------
js2
My Apple II had a CP/M coprocessor card (manufactured by Microsoft) just so we
could run Wordstar.

------
projectramo
Whatever happened to Rob Barnaby?

~~~
paulgerhardt
A few interviews here: [http://www.digibarn.com/stories/wordstar-rob-
barnaby/](http://www.digibarn.com/stories/wordstar-rob-barnaby/)

~~~
projectramo
Thanks. Another source seems to be his linked in page. He started investing in
real estate and married his partner. Good for him!

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-
barnaby-01680389](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-barnaby-01680389)

------
rottyguy
IIRC, Word Perfect was a peer/competitor to Word Star back in the day.

------
zerr
Anybody remember ChiWriter? :)

~~~
someonefaraway
Oh yes. Wrote my diploma thesis in it, on a Schneider/Amstrad PC with an EGA
greyscale screen. At the time no other word processor had comparable WYSIWYG
formula editing support. Almost three decades have passed but I can still hear
the sweet sound of the matrix printer at 4 am the night before the deadline.
Those were the days...

------
Angostura
^KD

------
drivingmenuts
We changed the syntax and now it's called Markdown.

~~~
JulianMorrison
For all people are downvoting, I think you're right, the workflow of editing
in Markdown and rendering to text is pretty similar. Something like Pandoc
that extends raw Markdown gives you control codes that easily match and exceed
what WordStar could do. Well, except comments, those are a bit annoying. But
you can add them as inline footnotes which does simplify checking whether
you've missed any.

~~~
Something1234
You can use html comments to leave them

<!-- -->

~~~
JulianMorrison
Except those get transplanted into the output for all to read if they can view
source.

~~~
dredmorbius
Pre-pass through a sed, awk, perl, etc., filter to remove them. Make that part
of your document build.

If you're concerned.

