Legacy Hopes; It's Not Easy Being a Crank

Thanks to the headline that Microsoft will be supporting legacy products, I can finally breath a sigh of relief. This is something I've been waiting for for a long time.

In my case, I'm hoping Microsoft is going back to supporting Word 6. Not that Word 6 was such a great wordprocessor, far from it. But it did have a saving grace--to the best of my knowledge, Version 6 was the last version of Word that provided conversion filters for WordStar. And as we all know, WordStar--at least the text-based WordStar 4.0 for DOS--was the best text editor ever written, emacs and xywrite notwithstanding. It's fast, it's small, it's mouse-free. You can sit in the middle seat on an airplane and type as long as your battery holds out, and not have to worry about elbowing people on both sides of you (unless you want to, of course).

But WordStar did (or in my case "does") have an irritating proprietary format that goes back to the days when it only supported 7-bit ASCII. As WordStar moved into the modern world, it added a "document" mode which set the high (8th) bit to force line wraps or word wraps or whatever. (Its "non-document" mode doesn't set the high bit, but then you didn't get any text formatting--italics, bold, and the like.) For details on this (if you care), check out the WordStar Resource Site where other cranks like myself tend to hang out.

The point is the proprietary format. You have to have a filter to convert WordStar documents into something the rest of the world recognizes. And thankfully, Microsoft provided this service up to and including Word 6. Subsequent to that version, however, WordStar filters disappeared from Word, stranding folks like me.

I like WordStar and want to keep using it. I don't have to think about the program when I'm typing, but can think about "what" I'm typing. (Okay, someone will be challenging my ability to "think and chew gum," let alone "think and type", but bear with me.) Everyone around me uses Word or Word-compatible programs. No one is going to switch to WordStar at this point.

Consequently, I end up starting out with a text file, which I work with in WordStar. I then convert it Word 6 to include any special formatting that's required, and pass it on to someone else. I should add that for a number of years, we were forced to using Word 6 because of a Quark quirk. The details and version numbers escape me now, but it had to do with moving Word docs into Quark and losing all formatting instructions unless it was a Word 6 doc. RTF, Word 97, and the like just wouldn't work. That problem might have gone away, but not my wanting to keep using WordStar.

Of course, Microsoft hasn't made it easy to maintain this level of non-compliance. Everytime I got a new computer over the years, I'd have to reinstall Word 6. Of course, subsequent version of Windows wouldn't let Word 6 run because of a missing SDM.DLL. Get that from an older computer, drop it in, and Word 6 runs like a champ--unless you lose your original Word 6 disks, which happened in recent move. So in this case, I ended up buying on eBay the complete Office Suite that included Word 6. What I got for my $5.00 purchase was 37 3.5-inch diskettes. Yes, 37 diskettes. How easy it is to forget what life was like before DVDs or Web-based downloads.

The bottomline is that I now have the WordStar/Word 6 system I like, although the folks in IT support refuse to speak to me. So you can understand why I was delighted to learn that Microsoft will be supporting legacy products. Now all I have to do is convince Microsoft that Word 6, and by extension, WordStar 4.0 qualify.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 12:55 PM  Permalink