Matthew Gault
The old ways still have value. WordStar, an MS-DOS-based word-processing program first released in 1978, can live a little longer thanks to the archiving efforts of one of its biggest fans—Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer.
Writers tend to romance the objects they use to craft their work. They become fetish objects. The pen, the pad, the IBM Selectric. Even the Remington SL3 is an object of affection for various writers.
You’d think that some mysticism would be lost when moving from analog to digital methods, but that’s not true. Just look at the legendary WordStar. The beloved software helped writers as diverse as Ralph Ellison, Anne Rice, and George RR Martin. They all sang its praises.
“WordStar was beautiful, sublime,” Anne Rice said of the software in a 2015 Facebook comment.
Sawyer’s WordStar release is a complete archive of the final version of WordStar along with all its manuals. “I spent weeks putting all this together. The archive contains not just the WordStar program but also extensive resources on how to use it, in addition to fully text-searchable PDFs of the original manuals, totaling over 1,000 pages, scanned from my own copies,” he said.
He even included MS-DOS emulators in the archive to help get WordStar up and running. “I’ve 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that’s still actively developed and maintained, and another using vDosPlus, which still works wonderfully but is no longer maintained,” he said in the post.
In a world of ubiquitous word processors and content management systems, why do the likes of Sawyer, Michael Chabon, and James Gunn use an ancient program like WordStar?
Sawyer explained it beautifully in another post on his website. WordStar captures the long-hand writing experience. Most word processors act like typewriters, but WordStar mimicked the act of sitting down and writing out physical pages long-hand. “As a creative writer, I am convinced that the long-hand page is the better metaphor,” he said.
According to Sawyer, using Microsoft Word is a laborious top-down experience. It’s software meant for taking dictation. WordStar, on the other hand, has a different set of tools that are aimed at aiding the creation of a creative document. “WordStar offers a more productive approach at its most fundamental design level than does its competition,” Sawyer said.
