For all of you who still remember the key sequence "<Ctrl>-K <Ctrl>-D" and all the other sequences we had to learn at the dawn of the age of PC-based word processing, this series of stories from John Dvorak is for you. His specific story on Wordstar is fascinating. Like most folks who started using PCs in the late 1970s and early 1980s, WordStar was what we learned to use and inevitably came to have a love/hate relationship with. I do recall cranking out a lot of newsletters for the New Hampshire Outing Club at UNH in the mid-1980s using WordStar on a good old "portable" Kaypro computer. And as John recounts, I, too, recall the release of WordStar 2000 and the near-universal derision that accompanied that release. Still, for many years I continued using WordStar until finally succumbing to the pull of WordPerfect and eventually Word. (Although, I still am and probably always will be a user of vi/vim for many tasks.) Anyway, it's a great trip down memory lane for those of us who still remember...

Tags: computer history, dvorak, wordstar