Yards of thermal fax paper were utilized this past week…
Monster Zero, from the Pacific Northwest to the Desert and finally to the Big Apple.
…and, since I was bored one night, I dug up an old IBM Thinkpad, managed to jam 128mb (yes, megabytes, not gigabytes) of extremely obsolete RAM into it and a 20gb hard drive, then installed Freedos and Microsoft Word 5.5 on it – Just because I like to make old machinery hum with new life. I almost forgot how great MS Word 5.5 was – the last version before it was rewritten to work in a GUI and suddenly became bloatware with a paperclip with eyes scolding you for your spelling mistakes…
FreeDOS, a free, open-source MS-DOS clone OS
Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS, free download from Microsoft
I laughed out loud several times at your post. My eighteen year old son is enamored with recently obsolete technology as well. It seems we just can’t get enough of looking back at the close stepping stones that got us here. Great post. ~TH~
You may have started a Baby Wedge Renaissance with BWW. I know that I will now keep my eyes open for one of those low-key cuties. There’s a new TWDB entry for a 198X Olympia Carrera MD wedge that has a lovely, clean typeface.
I not only love old DOS word processors, I’m still using one regularly! It’s called PFS ProWrite. It does everything I need and uses the 80 column “terminal” display just fine. I even use their spreadsheet program, PFS First Choice, for my housekeeping spreadsheets. I only have one computer that this has 3.5″ floppy disk drive, however, so all my DOS work is concentrated on that machine. I love those old machines!
Yep, I think people forget how useful old machines are for specific tasks. WP and Spreadsheets work just as well in an 8 or 16-bit OS as they do on 32/64 bit OS’s, and so much faster thanks to the lack of all the bloat added when windowed OS’s had to be supported. Like instant on, instant saves, instant off.