JemmySci-fi writer and WordStar lover re-releases the cult DOS app for free
submitted a month ago by
Alphane Moon
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/wordstar-7-for-…
A new WordStar release? Maybe GRRM can finally finish the two missing ASOIAF books in a timely fashion with it!
My pet conspiracy theory is that he already wrote the books. But the failure of the last season of the series was so horrendous he decided to never publish them and we will probably only hear of them when they're published posthumously.
Why would the total dumpster fire that is GoT seasons 5-7, and the funeral pire hastily thrown together from beaver droppings and clown tears that is season 8, stop GRRM from releasing the books?
I think everybody understands game of thrones failed not because of the story, but because of the absolute hatred in the execution of the last two seasons.
If he released the final books, people would clamor for them, eat them up! A end to the story we got so invested in
GRRM gave the showrunners his notes on the last two books.
Now he famously doesn’t do traditional storyboards, he’s a very organic kind of author. He makes a character in his head, puts them in a situation, and just writes what they would do, and everything flows from there. But, every story does have to have a beginning, middle, and end. So the major plot points have to be written down somewhere.
You know how Jon turned into an NPC who just kept repeating that he didn’t want the throne, pretty sure that’s a major plot point that was in the notes. The note was probably “Jon doesn’t want the throne” so that’s all the dialogue the writers gave him.
There is a decent chance that season 8 was a beat for beat execution of George’s notes, white walkers invade, Jon unites the north and with Dani and they defeat them, march on kings landing, Dany descends into madness and burns down capitol, story over.
If that’s really how it’s ultimately going to pan out, I can see GRRM not wanting to release it after seeing how fans disliked the ending. I think fans disliked the execution of the ending more, but I can also see how disheartening it would be to get a glimpse of how people would react to the ending of a story you’ve been writing for almost 30 years, and finding out that it’s almost unanimously hated.
I agree. That could scare any author. Especially with the spoilers of the showrunners giving away your major plot beats.
I don't think there's anything that's unsalvageable about those major plot beats, they just have to be earned, which the showrunner is completely didn't do. But I think you could make each beat make sense, with time, structure, and motivation, most importantly the motivation. Which GRRM is famous for doing, so I have every confidence in him
I'd heard that part of the reason he hasn't finished the books is that he's looking for a reason for Dany to go back to Westeros. She's got a wealthy kingdom and three dragons *and* a Dothraki horde *and* the Golden Company, so what's her motivation for going to Westeros when she could more easily conquer huge parts of Essos.
Essos is clearly the prize, westeros is a side show.. like the UK vs Europe... But if you want to conquer Essos you can't leave your western flank open, you have to secure westeros before you can move your military eastward.
If her arc is freeing more slaves, and starts to look east, she has to wrap up the West. We could motivate it by showing diminished supply lines going east, and the logistical trouble going east. Have some harassment from the iron Islands, some piracy, continue to assassination attempts from the Lannisters, The iron Bank refusing to bend the knee - and funding competition, motivating a need to secure the West and put in place a hand of the queen so she can focus on the east. I think you could sell it as a good story
Update - I now realize, The Dragon queen is in Slavers bay / Dragon's bay, in the freaking middle of Essos, so everything I wrote above doesn't apply. There is no good reason to leave her empire and travel HALF the world away, skipping all these other kingdoms and leaving your rear open, with huge logistics and supply issues. Abandoning a perfectly good, and GROWING, power-base to secure a side-show because its where they killed your dad doesn't make sense, ESPECIALLY because the targarians only went to westeros "recently" and they are originally from Essos anyway.
She should expand her free slave empire slowly westward, and eventually secure a strong path to Westeros before the Dragon throne plot can happen, other than revenge, there is no urgency in recapturing Westeros
Because he's who wrote all the ideas everyone hated. He wasn't responsible for the laziness of the set designers (looking at you Starbucks cups) but he was responsible for a large number of decisions people hated
I wonder if there's a FOSS Linux compatible clone.
EDIT: There sure is. http://wordtsar.ca/
Apparently, The
joeeditor has ajstarmode, so says this old Stackexchange thread. I can't verify because I've never used Wordstar, butjoe's available in my distro's repository.No idea if it can read old WordStar files, but maybe you don't need that.
For the GUI version - and some old file capability, the same page and other searches turn up WordTsar which is in progress. The dev says they'll be picking up development again next month.
Joe is amazing. It’s my primary editor.
I've got muscle memory for sudo apt install joe.
Look Ma, I'm famous.
There's also WordGrinder, which is meant to do the job of no bullshit, no distractions word processing. It's a slight step above a text editor in that it can do bold and such but it's meant to get the words out of your head and onto the screen and that's about it.
Looking forward to the eventual frivolous takedown notice and/or lawsuit – suits seem to have absolutely zero brains when it comes to this stuff. Or, well, when it comes to anything except making themselves and their buddies on the board richer, really
My first real computer interaction in life was when I used the early version of ws that was a CP/M program rather than DOS (MS or IBM PC).
Frankly, I'd rather have a solid Wordperfect 5.x for DOS over Wordstar any day.
It sounds like there are a number of people with limitless wallets that would pay for a modern version of Wordstar…
It shouldn't be too hard to build one of the Linux clones as a static binary for the major platforms
Used to run it on my z80 back in the day, before moving on to WordPerfect 5.1.
700MB archive and no mention of source code, I mean couldn't someone implement the command set as an emacs mode?
It's a closed source program. There's not going to be any source code unless somebody goes through the massive effort of reverse engineering it. That effort would be much better spent improving a clone such as WordTsar.
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:
https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
It's packaged with two DOS emulators and a large amount of scanned documentation, that's why the file is so big.
I'm not sure what features it has that makes anyone want to still use it instead of a modern program. I certainly wouldn't want to be limited to an 80x24 character screen when editing a large text file.
Ok I looked at a few video clips. It's an on-screen editor with a bunch of pop-up help. Not sure if it also formats on the screen. I've always been ok with using markup-style formatters (ROFF back in the old days, more recently TeX, Org-mode, and that sort of thing) instead of wysiwig formatting. So it was just a matter of having some kind of text formatter, plus a formatting program. Both of those could be very simple. Wordstar looks complicated compared with a simple but functional MSDOS-era setup.
Still, if it's what you're used to, then might as well use it. GRRM says he likes it because it's distraction free. But, I think the freedom from distraction comes mostly from his running it on an actual, single function MSDOS machine that's off the internet and separate from his main computer.
This person doesn't have the source because it's not his software, he's just put together a big abandonware package of it. Apparently whoever actually does own Wordstar at this point is its own mystery.