“That’s how it seems to me, anyway,” he joked.
Well, Rick, I’m sorry. Just as a critic once called Citizen Kane “a shallow masterpiece,” I’ll qualify my enthusiasm for WordStar. I’ll be a responsible zealot.
Anyway, I like WordStar enough to use it to help explain the Lucky 13—my general criteria for judging software.
ABSENCE OF BUGS
Programs are like people. “Mature” software is more reliable. It’s more like a tried-and-tested salesman or secretary, less risky, say, than a green employee hired off the street.
A complex creation like WordStar, with its thousands of lines of instructions for your computer, won’t ever be 100-percent glitchless. But it’s close. MicroPro, the company selling it, normally tests its programs well before unleashing them on the market, and WordStar has been around since the late 1970s, giving others the pleasure of suffering bugs before you have a chance. Why should you pay for a software maker’s education? Not that you should always buy “mature” programs. Sometimes a newer one looks so promising that you might want to gamble.
GENERAL EASE OF USE
WordStar’s easy for many people—not all but many—to learn and use. Arthur Clarke picked up the ABCs of WordStar in days. A public relations woman at MicroPro International says she was doing serious work with WordStar the first day she used it. I believe her. My friend Michael Canyes explained the basics to me on the phone; but my main training was just hanging around computer stores and trying out Osbornes, which included WordStar as part of the standard package.
WordStar exercise books exist, the computer version of typing ones, but for me they would have been a waste of time. I was too eager to get to work with my new software.
A millionaire swears by WordStar; he has four secretaries deftly running it on Kaypros. A fifteen-year-old I know—smart, though not a prodigy—does his homework on WordStar, and the son of MicroPro’s founder learned it at age ten.