Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
'Logical, beautiful, perfect' WordStar rises again (zdnet.com)
21 points by CrankyBear 35 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



> There was no proper archive of WordStar for DOS 7.0 available online, so I decided to create one.

I wonder if someone could leak the source code. Googling the original developers listed on the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar) turns up some LinkedIn profiles (which I did not log in to check). I think I've read several stories of old source code getting recovered from a 3.5 floppy someone had in a garage somewhere. There's even a video where the LGR guy scavenged an old PC from a defunct warehouse-like computer repair shop and was able to pull source code from some old game from Sierra Online from it (it was a development machine, and they brought it in for repair in the 80s and never claimed it).


I wonder how close JOE is to WordStar, which I never used. It comes with Slackware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe's_Own_Editor


Pretty close if you start it with `jstar` instead of `joe`



I remember that my Dad wrote himself a clone of at least the wordstar functions that he used, he called it starword and ran it on his BBC micro.


Oh, please. Wordstar is nothing but an insignificant pre-GUI editor with roughly zero useful modern printer drivers.

For a comparable but better experience, choose any text editor — emacs, for example — and groff. You get the control-keys of your choice (wordstar should you so choose) and world class typesetting capable of anything, including books.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: