WordStar 7 for MS-DOS is Now Available for Free in Complete Archive

Before Microsoft Word, there was WordPerfect. And before WordPerfect, there was WordStar. And now, WordStar is back. Sort of: A science fiction writer who’s been using WordStar since the late 1970s has released the last MS-DOS version of this word processing app for free along with a treasure trove of documentation and other how-to information.

“WordStar was first introduced in 1978 and the final release — WordStar for DOS 7.0 Rev. D — came out in December 1992,” Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer writes on his blog. “The program has never been updated since, and the company that made it has been defunct for decades; the program is abandonware. But I still use it, and [Games of Thrones author] George R.R. Martin uses an earlier version. There has never — until now — been a complete online archive of the final version of the program along with all its manuals.”

Mr. Sawyer is making what he calls the complete WordStar 7 archive available for free. This incredible 650 MB ZIP file includes WordStar 7, over 1,000 pages of PDF scans of the original documentation, the contents of the original WordStar forum on CompuServe, and other information, plus two MS-DOS emulators, DOSBox-X and vDosPlus, required to run the app on modern PCs. As he explains, you must “install” the unzipped version of the archive to C:\WS, because WordStar assumes that location. And, yes, you can also run this on Linux or a Mac using the appropriate version of DOSBox-X.

His -README file is incredible. (There’s a separate README file from the original product as well.) As he explains, WordStar is abandonware, and it’s currently not clear whether an existing company even owns the intellectual property rights, given how many times it’s been passed around over the years. Sawyer also explained, separately, why he still uses an ancient text-based word processor all these decades later, despite the ready availability of far more modern and capable tools.

“A word processor that uses the typewriter metaphor — WordPerfect is one — might be ideal for low-level secretarial work: proceeding top-down through a document that has been created in content and structure by somebody else,” he explains. “But, as a creative writer, I am convinced that the long-hand page is the better metaphor. 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 … 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.”

It goes on, and I don’t agree with all of it, but you can’t ignore the history: Talent writers as diverse as Michael Crichton, Arthur C. Clarke, and Anne Rice have all waxed poetic about WordStar at one point or other. Ms. Rice, famously noted that, “WordStar was magnificent. I loved it. It was logical, beautiful, perfect. Compared to it, Microsoft Word is pure madness.” I can’t argue with that. (He says, writing these words with Typora.)

WordStar is one of the few PC apps that predates me: I’ve never used it. I used a variety of less sophisticated products on my Commodore 64, Apple II GS, and Amiga systems through the early 1990s, and I of course used WordPerfect (starting with the 4.x versions) and Microsoft Word in MS-DOS before moving on to Word for Windows after a brief and disappointing experiment with WordPerfect 6 for Windows.

This is all rather incredible.