Evil Dave and I were talking offlist regarding various matters, and he happen to mention that he maintains a site for old software. He mentioned WordStar.
I remembered using WordStar briefly at Cov Poly back in the mid 80s. Initially the Poly had advocated something called SMART, sort of like OpenOffice, but based on DOS. It wasn't bad for what it was, but WordStar was definitely a step up. Then I worked for a company in Leicester in 1986 and discover a revolutionary desktop publishing package (it was a bit more than just a word processor), called Volkswriter. At the time I thought it was the bees knees, but unfortunately it didn't seem to sell very well. The Leicester company was the only company I knew who used it. When I joined GEC a year later, they were firmly leading the way with Interleaf.
WordStar and WordPerfect were making great leaps and bounds as I recall at the time, and over took both. Then Windows 95 happened and MS Office gazumped the lot of them.
A shame really, as the others were great packages too.
Interesting aside, all my documentation for C programs at Cov Poly had to be done in nroff, as the lecturer hated DOS (no, the Linux vs Windows vs Mac is not a new debate ;p). I became a bit of a whiz at writing nroff macros and used to use them at GEC to write all my documentation from design specs to program user guides. I then had a little app that acting as filter into Interleaf. Kind of like POD and all the pod2... apps now :)
-Dom
