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Showing posts from October, 2017

Understanding WordStar - check out the manuals!

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Last month I was pleased to be able to give a presentation at ' After the Digital Revolution ' about some of the work I have been doing on the WordStar 4.0 files in the Marks and Gran digital archive that we hold here at the Borthwick Institute for Archives. This event specifically focused on literary archives. It was some time ago now that I first wrote about these files that were recovered from 5.25 inch floppy (really floppy) disks deposited with us in 2009. My original post described the process of re-discovery, data capture and file format identification - basically the steps that were carried out to get some level of control over the material and put it somewhere safe. I recorded some of my initial observations about the files but offered no conclusions about the reasons for the idiosyncrasies. I’ve since been able to spend a bit more time looking at the files and investigating the creating application (WordStar) so in my presentation at this event I was able to talk at