WordStar? Now That's a Name I Haven’t Heard in a Long Time... A Long Time.

Wordstar 7 for DOS is has been rereleased as freeware, along with tools to allow it to run on modern operating systems.

Before WordPerfect, the most popular work processor was WordStar. Now, the last ever DOS version has been bundled and set free by one of its biggest fans.

WordStar 7.0d was the last-ever DOS release of the classic word processor, and it still has admirers today. A notable enthusiast is Canadian SF writer Robert J Sawyer, who wrote the book that became the TV series Flashforward.

Thanks to his efforts you can now try out this pinnacle of pre-Windows PC programs for professional prose-smiths. Sawyer has taken the final release, packaged it up along with some useful tools — including DOS emulators for modern Windows – and shared the result. Now you, too, can revel in the sheer unbridled power of this powerful app.

The program has been a big part of my career – not only did I write all 25 of my novels and almost all of my short stories with it (a few date back to the typewriter era), I also in my earlier freelance days wrote hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles with WordStar.

The download is 680MB, but as well as the app itself, full documentation, and some tools to help translate WordStar documents to more modern formats, it also includes copies of two FOSS tools that will let you run this MS-DOS application on modern Windows: DOSbox-X and vDosPlus. Regular Register readers may recognize both from our story on how to run DOS on a 64-bit OS from last year. Sawyer also offers a handy command reference [PDF].

As an FYI, of that 680 MB, just about 6 MB is the actual program, the rest being documentation, converters, emulators, etc.

In any case, I still have a manual 70 year old Smith Corona "Portable" (15 lbs?) manual typewriter.

You kids have it easy, and get the f%$# off of my lawn.