Tuesday, August 6, 2024

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

"The preferred tool of Arthur C Clarke, Anne Rice and George R R Martin":

" Sawyer has taken the final release, packaged it up along with some useful tools — including DOS emulators for modern Windows – and shared the result."

" The download is 680MB, but as well as the app itself, full documentation, and some tools to help translate WordStar documents to more modern formats, it also includes copies of two FOSS tools that will let you run this MS-DOS application on modern Windows: DOSbox-X and vDosPlus. Regular Register readers may recognize both from our story on how to run DOS on a 64-bit OS from last year. Sawyer also offers a handy command reference [PDF]."

" While it certainly has been abandoned since the end of the 20th century, the term "abandonware" isn't a legal one. It's not clear to us who owns the intellectual property. We doubt it's one of the surviving offshoots, today's Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, but it could be another offshoot, Software MacKiev. Either way, it's very unlikely that the owners will care."

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