Interesting that the guy who wrote the article is an award-winning science fiction writer and also the author of FlashForward. They even made a TV series based on it.

These programs are great for sitting down and writing with no distractions, but if you have a setup with directories full of word docs, text files, various graphics, even excel sheets all related to what you are working on that you need to refer to and cross-reference, they are less useful than an older version of Word or OpenOffice/LibreOffice. And they are difficult to export, share... there's a reason we don't use typewriters anymore, or DOS programs whose output is confined within a single program.

I believe George R. R. Martin uses wordstar to write his books. I still hold a little hope that he will finish A Song of Ice and Fire series.

I've long considered getting a netbook, slapping freedos on it and running WordStar or WordPerfect as a writing deck.

I'm not sure how I would get my files I create off the device since USB support isn't really a thing.

Using its text mode, WordStar made a pretty good programming editor.

I still have memories of having to install Wordstar 2000 on 5 1/4" floppies. I think it was like 20 discs and painfully slow.