With the release of the large memory Amstrad machines the amount of available CP/M software has suddenly burgeoned. However the price of many of the releases is more than the hardware. New Word, a word processor, is an exception in that it has actually undergone some price cutting to attract a wider market but despite that it is still expensive by home micro standards. Perhaps the most important point is that New Word in very many respects behaves exactly the same as Wordstar, same control commands. same sort of file format etc. Some cynics may suggest that this is a positive disadvantage but Wordstar dominates professional word processing to an extraordinary degree. Jobs are advertised for Wordstar trained typists, many professional software packages and printers are configured to fit around Wordstar files, use the same commands etc. Okay, why New Word rather than the similarly priced Pocket Wordstar. Because it has a lot extra that Wordstar doesn't. Built in Data Merge (for form letters) with powerful conditional features, an 'undelete buffer' for recovering erased blocks, faster response times and better help facilities. Like most CP/M word processors you will get on much better with two drives, but 80K room can be made on a single drive work disc if you are ruthless. Tony Kendle , Popular Computing Weekly Issue 1985-11-28
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