Opening an old Wordstar text with Microsoft Word

This is what a sample line of Wordstar, written in February 1990, looks like when seen with the Editor:

withouô makinç á sounä

The last character of a word is distorted when a blank follows. Wordstar took the unused bit 8 of the usual 7 bit ASCII character to denote that the following blank could be repeated for typesetting with right side justification (Blocksatz). So the ending t, Ascii 0074 or 01110100, turns into an ô, Ascii 00F4 10110100 (thanks to rapidtables. I used to have my own Wordstar converter, written in Basic.)

To read this sort of Wordstar with todays Word (“Winword”), Microsoft used to offer a converter named WDSUPCNV:

 

I still found this program on the Wayback computer at 

https://web.archive.org/web/20070806140029/http://www.wordstar.org/wordstar/downloads/WDSUPCNV.EXE .

   The converter wants to be installed like this: To use these converters, copy the extracted .cnv files to the "\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Textconv" folder. 

    I just copied it into the same folder of my Winword.exe – another converter was there already – 

 

… and opened the Wordstar file with Word.

Incidentally, the line reads:
  without making a sound

Link to this post: https://bit.ly/fj31mcBEF

 = https://blogabissl.blogspot.com/2020/08/opening-old-wordstar-text-with.html   

 

My thanks to Joe Lewis at https://www.ehow.co.uk/how_8420269_convert-wordstar-word.html who described the method, but without giving a valid source for the little converter Wrdstr32. The article date, July 14, 2020, seems to be faked by ehow. No imprint given, no way to add a comment, sorry.