Category Archives: computers

WordTsar

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I read WordTsar Is Reviving the ’80s WordPerfect Writing Experience with considerable interest, but following it up with a look at WordTsar and WordTsar: Wordstar for the 21st Century quickly showed that the first author was not present during the word processor wars of the 1980s. WordStar lost to WordPerfect in that conflict, but still has some diehard fans, the most famous being George R.R. Martin, who still uses it on a DOS machiue. I have been able to run WordStar on FreeDOS, with FreeDOS running on a virtual machine. This was WordStar 4.0, which is now “abandonware,” i.e. free, but without any official support.

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More about the new(er) ThinkPad

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The 256GB drive on Another ThinkPad seemed a little small, so I replaced with 1 TB SSD. As in previous moves, I used Macrium under Windows to copy the contents of the existing drive to the new one, then rebooted into Linux and used gparted to add a new NTFS partition and a new ext4 partition on the larger drive. Following Lenovo ThinkPad X240 – Hard Disk Drive Replacement I physically removed the old SSD and installed the new one. Afterwards I rebooted into Windows and the new NTFS partition showed up as the D drive as planned.

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Reinstalling Windows

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I have an old (2011) Lenovo ThinkPad which I used for various tests that I have documented in these pages. At some point the Windows installation on it got corrupted. I tried reinstalling Windows from the recovery drive that I had created, but that failed. So I tried again with a USB drive that I had created using the Windows Media creation tool. I think I had created this on another system, but it worked just fine after I put in old Windows activation code for the system. It took a while to download all the Windows updates it needed, but I expected that.
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WordStar on FreeDOS

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After last time I tried to ftp a file from my Linux host to FreeDOos. The connection worked, but I could not do the transfer. Somehow my C drive was full. 0 bytes free. So I looked again at How to Backup VM(s) on VirtualBox to see how to restore my snapshot. This worked, although I had to use the “clone” option to restore it under another name. After the restore dir c:\ showed plenty of free space. So I tried the ftp again. I ran cd c:\net\mtcp and then used ftp (the basic ancient ftp client) to get Ws4.zip from the host. I had used this program a lot back in the 1990s. This particular zip archive has the installation files for WordStar 4.0, which was released jn 1987 and which I used at home in the late 1980s and into the 90s.

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Installing FreeDOS

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After mentioning DOS in Programming in Pascal I Downloaded FreeDOS 1.3. I had previously installed VirtualBox on Ubuntu 22.04 system using Synaptic Package Manager. For the installation I followed How to install FreeDOS on VirtualBox. It seems that I have a later version of VirtualBox than the video, so I did not see exactly what is in the video, but it was close enough. Per the video I used the VDI file type for the VM file. The installation was successful. A couple notes:

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