https://mansfield-devine.com/speculatrix/2017/03/from-the-archives-wordstar-5-review/
This piece was written for Personal Computer World – I presume in 1989 when WordStar 5 appeared.
Note the bit about needing 512K of memory – you have been warned!
I also discovered from some text I’d originally included at the beginning that my old Telecom Gold (aka BT Gold) address was 10074:MIK031. This was, of course, in the days when ordinary humans were not allowed internets.
WordStar simply refuses to act its age. The old faithful word processor is ten years old, and in many ways has started to look it. It has taken some serious knocks from the competition, with the latest incarnations of WordPerfect and Microsoft’s Word making WordStar look positively stone-age. Yet Micropro isn’t giving up yet. The new version of WordStar Professional – release 5 – has given the program a much-needed facelift. Many of the enhancements are WordStar catching up with its competition, but some of the changes are more than cosmetic.
WordStar 5 main screen. This is actually version 5.5.
Familiarity may breed contempt, and there are plenty of people who won’t go near WordStar, but it’s the past popularity of the program that helps keep it alive. Other text editors boast of their compatibility with WordStar commands, however arcane they may be, because there are so many fingers out there trained to behave that way. Users and companies are reluctant to invest the time and trouble, not to mention money, to retrain for another word processor.
With version 5, Micropro has tweaked some of the features, seriously enhanced others and has thrown in a whole bunch of new ones. The company, not unnaturally, is putting the emphasis on some of the new version’s more visual improvements. These include drop-down menus, automatic reformatting of text, page preview and multi- column formatting, which look good in the demos and sound good in the literature. Indeed, there are no less than 300 enhancements compared with version 4 (which itself had a similar number of upgrades over the previous version).
Aside from some snazzy new graphics, the packaging is comfortingly familiar. A box contains the disks, function key templates, a quick reference command booklet and the usual registration cards and promotional literature. The single manual is now perfect bound, rather than ring bound. Presumably the fact that it won’t stay open at your chosen page means it is also difficult to hold flat on a photocopier.
As is inevitable with any new version of WordStar, the disk count has increased. WS5 comes on 12 5.25in floppies – the 3.5in version has yet to be released. Installation on a hard disk is a simple matter of creating a new directory and copying the files into it. Alas, there is no information about which files can be safely deleted if you don’t want, say, PostScript support. Once everything is copied over, apart from the tutorial files, the program occupies a little over 3Mb of disk space. At this point I would suggest that people without hard disks should start thinking about alternative word processors.
You can run WordStar straight from the box, but most users will want to modify it at least a little. This is done the normal WordStar way by running the WINSTAL program to set the basic system parameters – screen and printer type, disk configurations and so on – and then using the WSCHANGE program at any time later to fine tune the program. No surprises there.
Your first shock comes when you run the program. In place of the usual opening menu is … well, not much. You still get the disk directory, but in place of the full menu is a menu bar. Pressing the first letter of one of the options brings down another menu. The drop-down windows are available in edit mode, too, where the first letter of the option is used with the Alt key to call up the menu.
Two documents open at once! The future has arrived. The top document has some text in italics. That’s obvious from the fact that the text is not italicised, is blue and is surrounded by ^Y markers. It couldn’t be more intuitive…
The new menus may help to sell the package to people who are new to the program. WordStar’s problem has always been that it is hostile to new users. The largely illogical control key strokes can be difficult to learn, and the old style of menus – now called ‘classic menus’ – was always a compromise. Now you can find most of the program’s features quite easily. However, all the old keystrokes still work, so existing users will have no problems. Indeed, the drop-down menus can be turned off – they are selected by setting the help level to four. Old hands can set the help level they normally use and WordStar 5 will look and behave just like version 4.
Other areas have been tidied up, too. In place of simple prompts, dialogue boxes are used. For example, when you set a new margin, instead of getting a prompt to type in the new value, you get a form covering the full range of formatting values – margins, page size and so on.
Dimensions can now be entered in inches, as well as the more conventional columns and lines, and this is an important step. Doing everything by columns was fine in the days when the vast majority of printers had simple, monospaced fonts. Now there are such things as laser printers, and dot matrix printers with sophisticated proportional printing capabilities, it’s about time WordStar was able to use them properly.