Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderI have a copy of WordStar running on an Franklin Ace 1200 (Apple II+ clone from 1983)... it runs WordStar via a Z80 peripheral card that runs PCPI CP/M while talking to the Apple 6502 to use the rest of the peripherals. So even then people were using workarounds to keep on running WordStar on newer hardware... I still write letters with it and print them on my dot matrix printer. I certainly wouldn't reach for it over emacs in…
Jim Fox was a key programmer for WordStar. He never got much credit. I guess because he was just an employee. Jim thought, and talked about WordStar up until his death a few years ago on the streets of San Rafael. I’m posting this because he would want it. Jim was so proud of his contributions to WordStar, and told anyone who was within speaking distance. Jim was pretty happy guy, but couldn’t find work, and wasn’t near crazy enough…
I always thought one of the nice concepts that WS did was the presentation of the command menu. WordStar worked with prefixes, much like Emacs. I think it used ^K and ^Q. But, no matter. The important thing was that if you hit one of the prefix keys, a menu of all the commands would come up. And it was a non trivial menu. More a panel, full screen width, 8-10 lines long. However, if you were fast enough, the…
The WordStar keyboard shortcuts influenced other programs. Turbo Pascal and other Borland apps used the WordStar layout, for example. The joe [1] editor still uses it, and that's probably why it's my go-to text editor when I'm in the shell. In particular, Borland's IDEs supported both a clipboard and the WordStar "block" commands, which gave you selection superpowers. A block was a selection that persisted even if you moved the cursor around, and even if you copied or pasted stuff…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 3
- Total points
- 515
- Total comments
- 257
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-09-05 | WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) | Tomte | 14 | 5 |
| 2016-10-28 | WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) | Tomte | 3 | 0 |
| 2017-03-12 | WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996)First breakout · Best thread | Tomte | 152 | 106 |
| 2018-06-30 | Wordstar – a writer’s word processor | bluedino | 3 | 0 |
| 2021-03-06 | WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) | Tomte | 148 | 92 |
| 2021-05-31 | Robert J. Sawyer: WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) | amadeuspagel | 48 | 1 |
| 2022-12-22 | WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) | Tomte | 2 | 0 |
| 2024-06-26 | WordStar – A Writer's Word Processor (1990)Hall induction · Latest 20+ point return | _Microft | 142 | 51 |
| 2026-05-13 | WordStar | andsoitis | 3 | 2 |