By skyforbes 
RETROCOMPUTING
Software bloat is not a new thing: it was happening as far back as 1988.
WordStar 2000 Plus was the third version of the widely hated word processor. The reaction to the original WordStar 2000 was similar to the one that greeted New Coke. Well, actually no, it was different — better and worse.
New Coke and the original Coke were just slight variations of vile, corrosive, sugared water. WordStar 2000 was actually a very capable piece of software. Its sin was just that it wasn’t WordStar — the one we all knew and loved and had programmed into our muscle memory.
And it was big, arriving on 19 5.25in floppy disks and taking up a whopping 6MB of disk space.
Below are not one but two reviews from 1988 — for Which PC? and PC Amstrad. I always liked to try to sell reviews to more than one publication — it made the time spend getting to know the software more worthwhile. Think of it as recycling.
My biggest surprise in re-reading these reviews is that I clearly liked the software. I never did switch to it, though.
I wanted to show some screen grabs for this article, but my first attempt at installation under FreeDOS on VirtualBox did not go well. (To be…
Learn more about From the archive: WordStar 2000 Plus reviews