In brief: Before Microsoft Word became the de-facto standard for word processing on the PC, the market was rich with choice. WordStar is a program many great writers started their career on, and now even the most juvenile authors can easily access this classic tool thanks to DOS emulation and a repackaging effort by Robert Sawyer. Science fiction writer Robert J.
Sawyer uses WordStar 7.0 to write his award-winning stories. The word processor was last updated in December 1992, meaning it has been " defunct " for decades and could be considered abandonware.
While there is no legal consensus about how such software and copyright laws should interact, Sawyer is confident enough that he can provide the last WordStar version for DOS to other people through the internet. The Canadian author decided to create a "proper" archive for WordStar for DOS 7.0 Rev.
D , working for weeks to add some additional material and make the program easier to run on modern systems. The 680 MB download includes WordStar and a pair of DOS emulators (DOSBox-X and vDosPlus) to quickly launch it on Windows. The archive provides the full installs of the program as well as images of the installation disks, PDF versions of the seven original manuals, additional utility programs, and more.
WordStar has been a big part of Sawyer's career, as he wrote all 25 of his novels, his short stories, and freelance articles with it. The "finest word-processing program ever created" is still in use by other authors as well .