Why did Wordstar used to be like Joan Collins?

It's an old joke, actually — Collins was playing on Dallas at the time, but us older nerds remembered her for her Star Trek role as Edith Keeler, she-who-must-die in City on the Edge of Forever.

The answer was, "It's old, it's beautiful and it's a bitch." Which it was. Absolutely. I loved it.

Here's an antique ad from ComputerWorld showing WS 3.2 on an old ADM-3A terminal hooked up to a CP/M 2.2 box (mine was a Morrow MD-2, curiously one of the three or four computers the residual debt for which I was still paying off when my wife and I got married in 1990.)