Actually Wordstar used control-J to access various functions. It was
designed that way to eliminate the need to take your hands off the home
row. If you were proficient with Wordstar and a touch typist, you were
about 10-15% percent faster than someone using Word. Many newspaper
reporters used it just for that reason. Microsoft hated the competition
and so captured the control-J function (which happens to be a line
feed.) This meant that the Windows systems would not run Wordstar.
Wordstar also had WYSIWYG using these sequences to display the various
superscript, and subscript and other characters, including the math
characters and of course the nice 1/2 and 1/4 symbols as well.
Wordstar came with Mailmerge and was a wonderful package for people
doing newsletters or other mass mail programs.
I hated that microsoft trapped the control J sequence and made it
impossible to use Wordstar. The Wordstar team worked out a new
interface, but just as they released it, Microsoft made another low
level change to the windows interface that made the Wordstar team have
to create yet another work around, missing the market window. And
losing the ability to not have to use a mouse for the 80% composting
task.
Word was similar to another word processing program, but I can no longer
remember its name. The spreadsheet was a purchase, which Microsoft
"reengineered" and added some features and removed some to make it
compatible with their GUI, and they also changed the storage style,
which originally was all text based. I don't remember all the changes
now. I used that original spreadsheet, It was called supercalc or
something like that.
Personally I wish Wordstar was still available, before the MOUSE ruined
touch typing.
But word processors are subject to the whims of taste. I also did some
formal materials for marketing. I used a Macintosh with a simple text
editor and a program called Ready, Set, Go which was a separate
typesetting program, which included the ability to embed 3 to 6 layer
color graphics with a WYSIWYG on a Macintosh, but that was in the 1987
time frame I think.
The calendar application was similar to the calendar with events that
was part of the Wordstar package as well, but Microsoft embedded theirs
into Outlook about 1990 something. Wordstar was a full suite if you got
all the options, and could do many things that Word didn't begin to
accomplish until about 1995.
The reason I brought this up is because wordprocessing has been around a
very long time. Unix had some nice packages prior to 1984, and I used
some of them while I was still in the Navy. But with the demise of
Wordstar, I just gave up and started using the mouse. The mouse makes
the job both faster to learn and much slower to use, but that seems to
be the way of the world.
We all have our preferences.
Regards,
Les H
![[TEST] Document Foundation Community](https://communitytest.documentfoundation.org/images/discourse-logo-sketch.png){kind=logo}