Now, I’ll qualify my “speedy” verdict. WordStar will slow you down when your computer has to reach instructions that the program hasn’t already sent on to the RAM—the temporary memory. That means a time-consuming electronic trip to your floppy disk. Also, if you type in a certain amount of material, WordStar will automatically lock some of it on a disk if the RAM is running out of room. WordStar is a disk-based rather than a RAM-based word processor.
That has its virtues, however, since, by farming out the runover to a floppy, WordStar lets you work with longer files. Some RAM-based programs may limit each document to only 15 or 20 pages in many computers unless you electronically splice them together.
Altogether, I’d say that WordStar, evaluated as a disk-based, fully featured word processor, is fast. And new wrinkles like hard disks will make it run still faster, even without the speed improvements that very likely will come. MicroPro, in fact, recommends hard disks for users of WordStar 2000, even if it will run with two floppies. Very soon most office micros will contain hard disks.
POWER
WordStar is powerful. You can, for instance, type “@” instead of a long name used commonly in your work. Then, when you’re ready, you can plug the name in where the “@” appears. This search-and-replace feature is common to every advanced word-processing program; but WordStar implements it better than many rivals.
You can also use it with an accessory program, MailMerge, so you can type a list of names and addresses just once, then automatically plug them into the right spaces in a form letter. Only, it’s individually typed, so people needn’t know they’re getting a form letter.
Of course, “power” isn’t a virtue just in word processing. The best electronic filing cabinets, for instance, boast clever wrinkles to make it easier for you to enter new categories of information or to change individual records. Consider this story, which is true, about a reporter whom an editor was on the verge of firing. The severance pay was ready. The editor changed his mind at the last minute, however, and the final check stayed in his desk. Then, not long after, the paper’s auditor stormed into the city room. “Why didn’t you fire the son of a bitch?” he asked. “Now we’ll have to spend all this time straightening out the records.” Had the paper had a good, powerful electronic filing system, the nonfiring would have been a little less traumatic to the auditor.
FEWER CHANCES FOR BOTCH-UPS
WordStar limits the chances for careless errors in the first place.
While you’re working on a file, for instance, you can use the Control-KJ command to delete everything but the document you’re in the middle of.