Digital Archaelology: Codex (Floppy Disk) #3

Continuing on with this exploration of ancient magnetic archives, this is the third 5.25″ floppy disk from a stash discovered in a thrift store long ago. The first two disks revealed some not safe for work content but this one is a little more tame. It is labeled Word Star and that was in fact what was on the disk.

As you can see above, the directory structure looks a little odd. I don’t know if there was some corrupt stuff on this disk (it is around 30 years old after all) or this is just some artifact of Word Star program disks. There were no errors when I copied the data but who knows…

Loading up WordStar revealed the following:

So to be specific, this is WordStar Professional Release 4.

WordStar was originally written for CP/M based computers in 1978 and WordStar 3.0 arrived on DOS based computers in 1982. Wordstar 4.0 was a major code rewrite and it was also the last version that was available for CP/M machines. WordStar is known for its complexity but many touch typists loved it for its well placed control keys (shortcuts) that allowed one to perform many complex operations without moving your hands from the home row position.

WordStar dominated word processing for a number of years and was the most popular word processor until about 1985 when it was overtaken by Word Perfect. However, a number of famous writers used WordStar and some still do. George R.R. Martin, writer of Game of Thrones still uses DOS based WordStar 4.0 to write his books.

Basic typing and editing are pretty straightforward but getting proficient with all of the control key shortcuts would take some time, even once you understand the logic behind them.

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