There were many dedicated word processing machines at the time, but IBM's main competition was Wang Laboratories. But IBM dominated the "dedicated word processor" market with its " IBM DisplayWrite" application, which ran on machines dedicated to writing and editing documents. However, edited versions of a document were "Saved" only to this RAM disk, and had to be copied to physical magnetic media before rebooting.īy the mid-1980s WordStar was the most popular DOS word processing software in the world. WordStar would still access the "disk" repeatedly, but the far faster access of the RAM drive compared to a floppy disk yielded a substantial speed improvement. Users quickly learned they could make this version of WordStar run dramatically faster by using the ability of DOS to create a "RAM disk" in memory, and copy the WordStar program files into it. The first DOS version was a direct port of the CP/M version, and therefore only used 64k of RAM even though DOS supported up to 640k. WordStar's ability to use a "non-document" mode to create text files without formatting made it popular among programmers for writing code. The DOS version was very similar to the original, and although the IBM PC featured arrow keys and separate function keys, the traditional "WordStar diamond" and other Ctrl-key functions were retained, leading to rapid adoption by former CP/M users. The 3.0 version of WordStar for DOS was released in April 1982.
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