Technology

Yes that's what I mean, it didn't sound like he had the source code. Are people supposed to run it under emulation, or what? This is an MSDOS version that he packaged? 700MB archive?! That is an awful lot of floppy discs.

I confess to never having seen wordstar actually in use. Does it do anything particularly interesting, or is it mostly a set of key bindings that its users like?

I'm reminded of Neal Stephenson's description of Emacs:

In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the minimalist vi (known in some implementations as elvis) and the maximalist emacs. I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt